Stewart Lee Allen > Quotes

“Beer for breakfast, ale for lunch, stout with dinner and a few mugs in between. The average Northern European, including women and children drank three liters of beer a day. That's almost two six-packs, but often the beer had a much higher alcoholic content. People in positions of power, like the police, drank much more. Finnish soldiers were given a ration of five liters of strong ale a day (about as much as seven six-packs). Monks in Sussex made do with 12 cans worth.”
― Stewart Lee Allen, The Devil's Cup: A History of the World According to Coffee

“At this time to refuse or neglect to give coffee to their wives was a legitimate cause for divorce among the Turks." William H. Ukers (1873-1945).”
― Stewart Lee Allen, The Devil's Cup: A History of the World According to Coffee

“The guinea pig took another sip of his beer and rolled his eyes in exasperation - was this never going to end? 'He works better when he's drunk,' Señor Villanova explained. ”
― Stewart Lee Allen, In the Devil's Garden: A Sinful History of Forbidden Food

“We all know how it went when Europe changed from a culture addicted to depressants to one high on stimulants [...] Within two hundred years of Europe's first cup, famine and the plague were historical footnotes. Governments became more democratic, slavery vanished, and the standards of living and literacy went through the roof. War became less frequent and more horrible.”
― Stewart Lee Allen, The Devil's Cup: A History of the World According to Coffee

“[Joffe], during a visit to Russia, complained to his KGB handler about the awful coffee. The KGB dude replied that it was really the Kremlin's answer to America's neutron bomb -- both killed people but left the building intact.

"I was then that I first saw this vision,"said Joffe. Bad coffee equals expansionism, imperialism, and war; good coffee drips with civility and pacifism and lassitude...”
― Stewart Lee Allen, The Devil's Cup: A History of the World According to Coffee

“Coffee and humanity both sprang from the same area in eastern Africa. What if some of those early ape-men nibbled on the bright red berries? What if the resulting mental stimulation opened them up to a new way of looking at old problems, much as it did Europeans? Could this group of berry nibblers be the Missing Link, and that memory of the bright but bitter-tasting fruit be the archetype for the story of the Garden of Eden?”
― Stewart Lee Allen, The Devil's Cup: A History of the World According to Coffee

“Only two questions, however, need concern the civilized creature. Why is traditional kosher wine so second-rate (it is often boiled); and, if Muslims and Jews are the only people whose laws make them (almost) each other’s ideal dinner guests, why can’t they get along?”
― Stewart Lee Allen, In The Devil's Garden: A Sinful History of Forbidden Food

“We [Americans] became a nation of java junkies, wired from dawn to dusk intent on running faster, getting richer, dancing harder, playing longer and getting higher than anybody else.”
― Stewart Lee Allen, The Devil's Cup: A History of the World According to Coffee

“Taverns were not the safest place to discuss politics or religion. Everybody was armed or drunk, usually both, and proprietors sensibly discouraged heated discussions. Coffeehouses, on the other hand, encouraged political debate, which was precisely why King Charles II banned them in 1675 9 (he withdrew the ban in eleven days)... Intelligent people discussing interesting things in an intelligible manner.”
― Stewart Lee Allen

“In the winter, the beer froze, causing the alcohol to separate into high-proof liquor. We can be sure the resulting moonshine did not go to waste. To make matters worse, the main nonalcoholic source of nutrition, bread, is now believed to have been plagued with the hallucinogenic fungus ergot, the base ingredient for LSD. Drunk doctors, tipsy politicians, hungover generals: the plague, famine, and war. Add a pope on acid, and medieval Christianity starts to make a whole lot of sense.”
― Stewart Lee Allen, The Devil's Cup: Coffee, the Driving Force in History

“These foods are all drugs, of course. But so is coffee”
― Stewart Lee Allen, The Devil's Cup: Coffee, the Driving Force in History

“Coffeehouses were considered to be such hotbeds of revolutionary thought that rulers from Turkey to England outlawed them, sometimes on pain of death.”
― Stewart Lee Allen, The Devil's Cup: A History of the World According to Coffee