Coffee keeps you awake, warm and stifles hunger.
For these reasons it has been a go-to beverage — and edible — over the centuries, says Steve Topik, a world trade and coffee historian, and professor emeritus at the University of California Irvine.
During the industrial age, American immigrants in urban centers such as New York, Boston and Chicago spent hard-earned money on relatively expensive coffee, as opposed to food staples.
They did this to stave off hunger and keep them going on long shifts in factory jobs, Topik says.
Historically, there’s been a close relationship between war and coffee.
Going back to the 16th century in Ethiopia, soldiers carried coffee during forays. It weighed little, did not spoil, and kept people alert.
Originally, they ate the beans covered in butter, Topik says. The practice of drinking coffee came later.
Coffee found wider popularity in the United States in the early 1800s as part of the triangular trade among Europe, West Africa and the Caribbean and Americas.
Exchanged were finished products, slaves and raw materials. Coffee grown on colonial plantations, including those in Haiti and Brazil, figured in the trade.
Earlier, well before the American Revolution, the first coffee to arrive in Massachusetts likely came by way of Dutch traders in New Amsterdam (New York), he said.
The first major American coffee companies started during westward expansion in the mid-19th century.
These included the predecessor of the Folgers company, in 1850 San Francisco, where Gold Rush prospectors were among the early customers.
New England was home to Boston’s Chase & Sanborn, founded in 1864.
Nowadays, coffee consumption continues to climb.
Some 67% of American adults consumed coffee within a given day in spring 2024, a rate almost 20% higher than 20 years ago, according to the National Coffee Association.
The average American coffee drinker downs between two and three cups a day, a majority of it at home, according to several sources, including the coffee association, Statistica and Joe’s Garage.
Meanwhile, Massachusetts landed 10th among states with the highest number of coffee shops per person, 3,891 people per shop, stated a ZOMA mattress caffeine study in 2021.
That works out to a total of 1,795 shops in Massachusetts, based on a 2021 population of 6.985 million.
Topik started drinking coffee regularly in his youth when he was going to college.
“As brain food, to keep you awake,” he says.
It didn’t taste particularly good, but it served its purpose.
Topik has an interesting family connection to coffee.
His grandmother on his mother’s side had a coffee house in Vienna, Austria.
In his younger days, he spent six months living there.
He got familiar with the smell of coffee and how the coffee house, in the European tradition, was a social center.
His father’s family comes from Germany, where coffee has an established cultural place.
Topik taught history in Brazil, early in his academic career, and got well acquainted with coffee.
Brazil has been the largest producer of coffee for some 150 years and is a major consumer of the drink.
He has written the books “The Political Economy of the Brazilian State, 1889–1930” and “The World That Trade Created: Society, Culture and the World Economy, 1400 to the Present,” co-authored with Kenneth Pomeranz.
Coffee continues to play a major part in that world, the caffeine world, and here in New England it’s game on.