The King Who Tried to Kill Coffee

In the early 1700s, coffee was sourced primarily from the dry mountainsides of Yemen, an expensive luxury restricted to the European nobility. However, as the 1700s wore on, French and Dutch plantations in the Caribbean, built on the immense suffering of enslaved Africans, dramatically increased coffee production. In Indonesia, the Dutch forced the local population to cultivate it on Java. These huge increases in production helped reduce the price of coffee.

Coffee was unloaded at ports such as Le Havre, Amsterdam, Bremen, and Hamburg, then snaked its way inland by road and barge into the hundreds of kingdoms, duchies, and principalities that would later, in the 1800s, unify to form the modern state of Germany. The rich and some of the middle class in these regions would buy it green and roast it in their kitchens on flat iron pans.

But across Germany, the ruling nobility fretted, and perhaps none more so than Frederick the Great. He ruled Prussia, one of the larger German states, boasting a formidable military. Its territory would eventually expand to the size of the UK today, stretching across northeast Germany and deep into modern-day Poland, with its capital in Berlin.

Frederick’s troubled upbringing

Had Frederick been alive in Berlin today, he might have identified as queer. Historians suggest he had male lovers and kept a frosty distance from the wife he was forced to marry.

Unfortunately, Frederick’s father—‘the Soldier King’—was tyrannically strict. Frederick was beaten for showing interest in French culture and music and forced into rigid military training. At 18, while serving in the army, Frederick attempted to flee Prussia with the help of Hans, his best friend, confidant, and likely his lover.

Frederick was caught and imprisoned in Küstrin Fortress by his father, who also arrested Hans and forced Frederick to watch his best friend’s beheading from behind bars.

This deep trauma profoundly shaped Frederick, and he caved to his father’s will and worldview. He began to prioritize order, punctuality, and discipline, believing that Prussia’s survival depended on social discipline and frugality.

If there was to be a national Prussian drink, it would be beer. Beer was a form of food—hearty, strengthening, and patriotic—because all its ingredients could be grown within Prussia itself.

A widely repeated 19th-century retelling claims Frederick issued a ‘coffee and beer manifesto’ in 1777, complaining that, ‘It is a most detestable thing that my subjects take to drinking coffee... My people must drink beer. His Majesty was brought up on beer, and so were his ancestors, and his officers as well.’

Frederick’s fear of coffee

Coffee, in Frederick’s eyes, was distinctly anti-Prussian, and a dangerous new entrant to Prussian society.

For one, coffee was associated with idle gossip in coffee houses—loose talk that could undermine his state.

Another issue was that it challenged Prussia’s societal order. As European states grew bigger and more militarized, they needed more than just a kingly court ruled by land-owning nobles. They needed trained bureaucrats, tax collectors, administrators, and judges.

This new, increasingly literate class coincided with an intellectual flowering: the Enlightenment. Enlightenment thinkers argued that society should be organized according to reason, evidence, and debate, rather than what had existed before, namely tradition, religious authority, or inherited power.

These same intellectual movements would form the basis for the French Revolution in 1789, which led to many heads of the French ruling classes rolling away from blood-stained guillotines.

With the arrival of cheaper coffee, more people were now enjoying what was previously a luxury enjoyed exclusively by the nobility. But the widespread drinking of coffee challenged people’s prescribed place in the social hierarchy. If coffee could break these rules of social order, what might come next? Could society come crashing down into revolution?

Worse, coffee was a dangerous drain on Prussia’s economy. It could not be grown domestically, and Prussia would have to trade away its precious gold reserves to foreign merchants. Beer was also more lucrative for Prussia because the state could raise vital revenue by taxing Prussian breweries. By contrast, it was practically impossible to tax coffee roasting in people’s kitchens.

Frederick’s war on coffee

And so, in the 1760s, Frederick began his attack on coffee. Fashioning himself as an ‘enlightened’ ruler, he devised a ‘rational’ way of bureaucratically managing the coffee problem.

He began by hiring French officials to collect import duties on coffee at ports and Prussia’s borders. Despite increasing tariffs over the years, these efforts had minimal effect. Coffee could easily enter Prussia through myriad ports in Western Europe, bypassing tariffs.

In the 1770s, he ratcheted up his efforts by banning the lower classes from drinking coffee entirely. If they wanted coffee, they could drink homegrown substitutes made from chicory and acorn instead. He also used French officials to enforce this ban, but, as before, they proved ineffective and became even more unpopular.

He changed tack in the 1780s by establishing a state monopoly on coffee roasting. Effectively, all coffee in Prussia now belonged to the state. In theory, coffee could still be drunk by the appropriate classes, but only if roasted by state-licensed roasters. This therefore prohibited home roasting, then the most popular method.

To enforce the home roasting ban, Frederick employed some of the many invalid army officers in what was popularly known as Kaffeeschnüffler (‘coffee sniffers’). They were depicted walking the streets of Prussia; if they caught a whiff of coffee’s distinctive strong roast aromas, they would barge into homes, confiscate beans, and fine offenders.

The fact that the Kaffeeschnüffler were Prussians, and not the deeply unpopular (and foreign) French, helped sweeten the bitter coffee-roasting-ban pill. But as enforcement intensified, so did resistance. Frederick was mocked, smuggling continued, and the public roasted their coffee late at night to avoid detection.

Ultimately, Prussia’s war against coffee came to an end with the death of Frederick himself in 1786. Coffee bans were gradually ignored, and inspectors lost authority.

Looking back on Frederick today, he appears to be a man of split personalities: when in Berlin, the capital of Prussia, he ruled with authoritarian rigidity. In his regimented daily routines, he would often drink light beer (Biersuppe) and diluted wine instead.

But when he travelled to his Sanssouci (‘without a care’) palace in neighbouring Potsdam, he indulged his love of music in intimate music rooms where he often played the flute. Within its rooms, replete with poetic imagery, Frederick embraced the Enlightenment’s culture of critical thinking.

In his Sanssouci pleasure palace, he might have loved coffee. Caffeine, after all, fuels ideas and exchanges. Had Frederick had a gentler father who allowed him to indulge his creativity, perhaps one of those palace rooms might even have been a temple to coffee.

Frederick’s lasting legacy

In any case, in the early 1800s, the tables began to turn against beer and in favour of coffee. The Industrial Revolution introduced large machinery into factories, where workers were required to be sober, alert, and productive. Coffee drinking was encouraged, and by the early 1900s, Germany became one of Europe’s largest per-capita coffee consumers.

Coffee also physically reshaped the hugely important German city of Hamburg. Around 150 years ago, Hamburg transformed into one of the most efficient transportation and logistics hubs in the world. That story of how coffee quite literally built a city is explored in the third series of A History of Coffee, a narrative podcast series produced by me and historian Professor Jonathan Morris.

As Germany went on to embrace coffee wholeheartedly, it might appear Frederick’s war against coffee is a comedic historical anecdote. But don’t be fooled: his ghost is very much with us today.

His disdain for coffee cropped up again in 1953, when West Germany’s government introduced a peculiar bill, the Kaffeesteuergesetz (‘the coffee tax’), requiring every roaster in Germany to pay a tax on every kilogram of roasted coffee.

This tax is the bane of every roaster in Germany. When I moved to Berlin to work for a time as The Barn’s International Wholesale Manager, keeping track of and calculating the coffee tax was a stressful nuisance. And, at €2.19 per kilo, it made selling coffee into a fiercely competitive international coffee market that much more difficult.

I blame Frederick for my troubles. He normalized the notion that the state has both the right and duty to tax coffee roasting. As Prussia spearheaded Germany’s unification in the 1800s, its fiscal logic became German fiscal logic. And so, when post-war Germany was looking for ways to raise taxes, the idea of coffee funding the state was a no-brainer.

It’s tempting to treat Frederick the Great’s war on coffee as little more than an 18th-century oddity, a story of authoritarian overreach and absurd coffee sniffers. But these historical anecdotes can cast long shadows over our lives. Whenever I take a sip of coffee in my podcast studio in Berlin, Frederick’s ghost might as well be standing next to me, holding out a money pot, demanding a few cents in tax.