The Finnish coffee company, Paulig, has been around for a good long while–since 1876, to precise. But only in 2017 did they get around to doing this–enlisting Helsinki designer Lucas Zanotto “to make the smallest cup of coffee, out of 1 bean.” Zanotto doesn’t need much more than a nail file, candle, and thimble-sized cup to produce that tiny cup of joe. Conceptually, it’s a neat exercise in efficiency and conservation. But, practically speaking, will it get you through the day?
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We denizens of the craft-roasting, wi-fi-connected 21st century know well how to drink voluminous quantities of coffee and argue our opinions. In 17th-century London, however, such pursuits could look shocking and dangerous, especially since they happened in coffee houses, the new urban spaces where, according to Res Obscura’s Benjamin Breen, you could “bet on bear fights, warm your legs by the fire, witness public dissections (human and animal), solicit prostitutes (male and female), buy and sell stocks, purchase tulips or pornographic pamphlets, observe the activities of spies, dissidents, merchants, and swindlers, and then read your mail, delivered directly to your table.”
The patrons, while engaging in all that, partook of “a new drug from the Muslim world—black, odiferous, frightening, bewitching — called ‘coffee.’ ” Quickly finding itself subject to a great deal of scientific research and everyday argument as to its merits and demerits, the drink set off the satirical “Coffee Revolt of 1674,” which began that year with a pamphlet called “The Womens Petition Against Coffee,” purporting to offer “The Humble Petitions and Address of Several Thousands of Buxome Good-Women, Languishing in Extremity of Want.”
It seems that England, once “a Paradise for Women” thanks to “the brisk Activity of our men, who in former Ages were justly esteemed the Ablest Performers in Christendome,” had, for the non-coffee-drinking sex, become a deeply unsatisfying place:
The dull Lubbers want a Spur now, rather than a Bridle: being so far from dowing any works of Supererregation that we find them not capable of performing those Devoirs which their Duty, and our Expectations Exact. The Occasion of which Insufferable Disaster, after a furious Enquiry, and Discussion of the Point by the Learned of the Faculty, we can Attribute to nothing more than the Excessive use of that Newfangled, Abominable, Heathenish Liquor called COFFEE, which Riffling Nature of her Choicest Treasures, and Drying up the Radical Moisture, has so Eunucht our Husbands, and Cripple our more kind Gallants, that they are become as Impotent as Age, and as unfruitful as those Desarts whence that unhappy Berry is said to be brought.
Coffee, so insist the Buxome Good-Women, renders the men of England “as Lean as Famine, as Rivvel’d as Envy, or an old meager Hagg over-ridden by an Incubus. They come from it with nothing moist but their snotty Noses, nothing stiffe but their Joints, nor standing but their Ears.” These charges drew a response in the form of the “Mens Answer to the Womens Petition Against Coffee, Vindicating Their own Performances, and the Vertues of that Liquor, from the Undeserved Aspersions lately cast upon them by their SCANDALOUS PAMPHLET.” In it, the “men” ask the “women,” among other questions,
Why must innocent COFFEE be the object of your Spleen? That harmless and healing Liquor, which Indulgent Providence first sent amongst us, at a time when Brimmers of Rebellion, and Fanatick Zeal had intoxicated the Nation, and we wanted a Drink at once to make us Sober and Merry: ‘Tis not this incomparable settle Brain that shortens Natures Standard, or makes us less Active in the Sports of Venus, and we wonder you should take these Exceptions, since so many of the little Houses, with the Turkish Woman stradling on their Signs, are but Emblems of what is to be done within for your Conveniencies, meer Nurseries to promote the petulant Trade, and breed up a stock of hopeful Plants for the future service of the Republique, in the most thriving Mysteries of Debauchery; There being scarce a Coffee-Hut but affords a Tawdry Woman, a wonton Daughter, or a Buxome Maide, to accommodate Customers; and can you think that any which frequent such Discipline, can be wanting in their Pastures, or defective in their Arms?
“The extravagant claims for coffee made by men’s-health handbills exposed the commodity to satire,” writes Markman Ellis, author of The Coffee-House: A Cultural History, but “that coffee might have a deleterious effect on male virility was a theory accorded considerable scientific respect.” Still, pamphlets like the “Womens Petition” took as their target less the biological effects of coffee than “the new urban manners of masculine sociability that coffee represents. The satirist accuses coffee-house habitués of being ‘effeminate’ because they spend their time talking, reading, and pursuing their business rather than carousing, drinking, and whoring.” If any women of the 21st century would really prefer that men go back to those old ways — well, it would at least make for an interesting argument.
Drink our coffee. Or else. That’s the message of these curiously sadistic TV commercials produced by Jim Henson between 1957 and 1961.
Henson made 179 ten-second spots for Wilkins Coffee, a regional company with distribution in the Baltimore-Washington D.C. market, according to the Muppets Wiki: “The local stations only had ten seconds for station identification, so the Muppet commercials had to be lightning-fast–essentially, eight seconds for the commercial pitch and a two-second shot of the product.”
Within those eight seconds, a coffee enthusiast named Wilkins (who bears a resemblance to Kermit the frog) manages to shoot, stab, bludgeon or otherwise do grave bodily harm to a coffee holdout named Wontkins. Henson provided the voices of both characters.
Up until that time, TV advertisers typically made a direct sales pitch. “We took a different approach,” said Henson in Christopher Finch’s Of Muppets and Men: The Making of the Muppet Show. “We tried to sell things by making people laugh.”
The campaign for Wilkins Coffee was a hit. “In terms of popularity of commercials in the Washington area,” said Henson in a 1982 interview with Judy Harris, “we were the number one, the most popular commercial.” Henson’s ad agency began marketing the idea to other regional coffee companies around the country. Henson re-shot the same spots with different brand names. “I bought my contract from that agency,” said Henson, “and then I was producing them–the same things around the country. And so we had up to about a dozen or so clients going at the same time. At the point, I was making a lot of money.”
If you’re a glutton for punishment, you can watch many of the Wilkins Coffee commercials above. And a word of advice: If someone ever asks you if you drink Wilkins Coffee, just say yes.
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FYI: Courtesy of Penguin Random House, you can download The Book Lover’s Guide to Coffee. This free guide–a “celebration of ideas that make coffee and literature inseparable”–features:
6 authors on coffee’s cultural significance ;
The rituals of 7 famous coffee-obsessed authors;
Infographics rich with caffeinated, bookish data;
Tips on taking the perfect coffee;
Brewing guides from Birch Coffee.
You can download the coffee guide here. (They do require an email address.) Meanwhile, find more good coffee items in the Relateds below.
Travis Rupp is a classics instructor at The University of Colorado. He’s also a “beer archaeologist” who works on a special projects team at the Avery Brewing Company (in Boulder) where they “brew beers the way that ancient Egyptians, Peruvians and Vikings did.” If you can understand the beer an ancient people drank, you can better understand their overall culture. That’s assumption at the heart of beer archaeology.
Above, watch a three minute introduction to Rupp’s work. Below, find information on some of the world’s oldest beer recipes from Ancient Egypt and China.
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A couple of years back, we introduced you to what was considered the oldest known beer recipe–an Ancient Sumerian recipe dating back to 1800 BC. It turns out, however, that the Chinese had the Sumerians beat.
Above, you can watch Stanford students recreate a 5,000-year-old beer recipe which Professor Li Liu revealed to the world last spring. According to Stanford News,Liu and a team of researchers recently found the recipe while “studying the residue on the inner walls of pottery vessels found in an excavated site in northeast China.” As part of the course Archaeology of Food: Production, Consumption and Ritual, Professor Liu’s students recreated the discovered concoction, following this general process:
The students first covered their grain with water and let it sprout, in a process called malting. After the grain sprouted, the students crushed the seeds and put them in water again. The container with the mixture was then placed in the oven and heated to 65 degrees Celsius (149 F) for an hour, in a process called mashing. Afterward, the students sealed the container with plastic and let it stand at room temperature for about a week to ferment.
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“You know that my hobby is hunting wild mushrooms,” says John Cage in the 1990 reading at Harvard University you can hear above. “I was sure there was a haiku poem — Japanese — that would have to do with mushrooms, because haikus are related to the seasons: spring, summer, fall, and winter, and fall is the period for mushrooms.” Having found a suitably autumnal piece of verse by seventeenth-century poet-saint Matsuo Bashō featuring a mushroom and a leaf, Cage first reads the Japanese-language original, then offers translations, his favorite being this loose interpretation: “What leaf? What mushroom?” Perhaps we’d expect that from a more-zen-than-zen avant-garde composer best known for four minutes and thirty-three seconds without music.
But Cage’s mushroom hobby may come as more of a surprise, let alone the fact that it turns out to have gone much deeper than a hobby. “He won a mushroom quiz contest in 1958 on Italian television,” writes the New York Times’ Edward Rothstein in a review of For the Birds, Cage’s book of conversations with philosopher Daniel Charles. “In the 1960s he supplied a New York restaurant with edible fungi. He led mushroom outings at the New School. He knows a Lactarius Piperatus burns the tongue when raw but is delicious when cooked. He has even had his stomach pumped. As Marcel Duchamp wrote, inscribing a chess book for his cagey friend, ‘Dear John look out: yet another poisonous mushroom.’ ”
Cage happened upon mushrooms, quite literally, while living in Carmel during the Depression. “I didn’t have anything to eat,” he tells composer and filmmaker Henning Lohner in a conversation collected in Writings through John Cage’s Music, Poetry, and Art. But he knew from “tradition” that “mushrooms were edible and that some of them are deadly. So I picked one of the mushrooms and went in the public library and satisfied myself that it was not deadly, that it was edible, and I ate nothing else for a week.” So began his journey to the status he called “amateur mushroom hunter,” albeit one with a professional breadth of working mycological knowledge.
“Fascinated by their haphazard growth, the artist went on mushroom hunts, studied fungi identification, and even collected them,” writes Artsy’s Sarah Gottesman. He “crystallized his mushroom obsession by co-founding the New York Mycological Society, along with some of his students from the New School,” and even “made a living by regularly supplying New York restaurants like the Four Seasons with the pickings from his mushroom hunts.” His Mushroom Book, a collaboration with mycologist Alexander H. Smith and artist Lois Long, came out in 1972, the year after he gifted his fungi collection to the University of California, Santa Cruz.
And yet in his beloved mushrooms, Cage found the same escape from the pre-cast strictures of logic and reason that he did in sound (or indeed in the brief burst of sense impression distilled in haiku): “It’s useless to pretend to know mushrooms,” he says to Charles in For the Birds. ”They escape your erudition.” Hyperallergic’s Allison Meier, in a piece on the Horticultural Society of New York exhibition of his work as a naturalist, also sees the possibility of “parallels between his free-thinking music and the unstructured way mushrooms sprout up haphazardly,” but points out that, in images of “Cage frolicking with his mushroom basket” or “the playful wind of words in the Mushroom Book,” we see that “this really was a passion in its own right” — and one, like his passion for music, that could produce unpredictably delicious results.
We’ve shown you a very simple way to open a bottle of wine, with nothing but a wall and a shoe. (Try it at your own risk.) Now comes the most artfully complex.
Above, watch Rob Higgs demo his mechanical sculpture, “The Corkscrew.” Created with found objects from scrapyards and farmsteads, the sculpture has 382 moving parts and weighs 700+ pounds, reports the BBC. Designed to pull a cork from a bottle and pour the wine, the steampunk sculpture is not just beautiful. It actually works.
According to the Daily Mail, you could buy “The Corkscrew” for somewhere bewteen $90,000 and $120,000.
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