The origins of your morning cuppa

On a dreary Monday morning, after a long, tiring weekend of debauched activity in order to wash away the stain of the working week, all you want is to reach for a hot steaming cup of coffee to kickstart yet another week of whatever it is you do for a living.

The associations of coffee and reluctantly waking up in the morning are evident in the special place coffee holds in our popular culture. Coffee, you might even say, is the working man's (or woman's) drug. Why do we need it so much though? And more importantly, when did we start needing it as much as we do?

Strangely enough, the humble coffee bean is thought to have first been hailed as having energizing properties (what we now call the caffeine kick or fix) in Yemen, in the Middle-East, as well as in parts of Ethiopia in Africa. While Sufis in their monasteries were sipping cups of coffee, rumour of the drink's potency spread from the Middle-East to Italy, the phenomenon soon caught on with all the European nations and thence to the rest of the world. However, since coffee's origins were pagan, once the Church came on the scene, it tried to ban the consumption of this heathen drink, while coffee also became embroiled in the political scenes of the Middle East and was banned for its potential to incite revolutions!

Coffee's potential to bring people together is what we can probably attribute the above to: just look at the things people get up to in coffeehouses (or cafes). Walk into any cafe today and what you'll probably be confronted by is people sitting by themselves and reading, or sitting in groups and having either frivolous, gossipy conversations of loudly declaiming their opinions on anything from the unjust nature of award shows to the metaphysics of Kantian philosophy. Coffee, quite simply, offers people an excuse to sit together and talk. The history of the coffeehouses in England of the eighteenth century is well known for the proliferation of writers, thinkers and politicians it produced; nobody could read about Paris and not come across the peculiar history of Parisian cafes as being the haunt of intellectuals and those with ideas that would change the world. The Enlightenment, the single most influential intellectual movement in European history, certainly owed a great deal to the presence of coffee houses.

Traditionally seen as more of a men's drink than the more delicately flavoured tea, coffee has become one of the necessities of modern life. Could you imagine feeling civilized before 9pm without your trusty cup of coffee? As much as medieval knights needed their swords and armour to go into battle, we need our cups of coffee to face the prospect of yet another working day or week. And who could forget coffee's promise after a drunken night out to make you feel less like you're dying and more like you want to get out of bed to be productive?

Far from being banned for its dangerous properties, modern culture touts coffee as the miracle cure for all of our mundane ills: tiredness, sleepiness, boredom, hangovers... the list is endless.