With cafe culture comes enlightenment

NOBODY knows who discovered the joys of coffee - but whoever it was really was a genius.

In the late Middle Ages, it was a not uncommon sanitary practice to disinfect water by the addition of alcohol.

This process killed bacteria and was somewhat effective at making water sources safe to drink from.

But the well-intentioned practice posed a slight problem.

As we might imagine these days in New Zealand, if everybody was drunk every day as a part of the status quo, it would have a major detrimental effect on social progress.

Imagine, if walking and talking after five hours of sleep is too difficult for some of us zombies, how we would manage to walk in a straight line when drunk?

Then we should ask how people in the 16th and 17th centuries could do so when perpetually inebriated? The simple answer is that people probably did not manage very well.

Fortunately when trade routes opened to the East, new beverages usurped the water-alcohol mix.

One such beverage was the simple - yet heavenly - coffee.

As coffee became a more prominent part of people's lives, a social revolution occurred: coffeehouses were established and began to grow in popularity. The first coffeehouse in England, The Angel, was founded in Oxford in 1650.

Coffeehouses boomed in number. They became informal centres of learning, sometimes going under the name "penny universities", and for good reason.

Although centres of higher learning grew and strengthened in this time, the learned academics, or "virtuosi", tended to frequent the coffeehouses of London, Oxford and wherever they could be found.

It cannot be considered coincidence that, around the same time, innovation and thinking expanded and the very roots of Western society were fundamentally altered.

From Descartes' Discourse on Method in 1637, to Newton's Principia Mathematica in 1687, this era saw many topics discussed in the English coffeehouse - from mathematics to science to philosophy, and all the pressing issues of the day.

We now know of this time as the beginning of the Enlightenment, and in a very real sense the discovery of coffee influenced the accompanying social paradigm shift.

Cafe{aac} culture created a melting pot of knowledge that even today the world does not see in many places outside of formal education, and it was this culture which helped to drive the changes in thinking that occurred in that period.

For example, basic sand filtration of drinking water was developed. Perhaps the fact that 72,000 New Zealanders are reported to be drinking water contaminated with faeces might explain the Crusaders' recent loss to the Reds.

After all, medieval health standards probably go hand-in-hand with medieval sanitary responses.

In other news, though, the influence of cafe{aac} culture on Western development will not surprise the average Wellingtonian, who can boast of their city that it has more worthy cafe{aac}s per capita than New York.

These days, the humble cafe{aac} is more egalitarian. Not only is the cafe{aac} a melting pot of knowledge, but now one of people and experiences too.

Coffee, and the cafe{aac} culture, is a vibrant part of what Wellington is at her core.

When visiting Auckland, I cannot for the life of me find a respectable coffeehouse on Queen St - so I might even go so far as to say our love of a decent brew must be definitive proof that Wellington is in fact more enlightened than her supercity cousin.
Prove me wrong, please!

But whoever discovered coffee - seriously, that is what I would call a eureka moment.

Morgan Watkins, Year 13, Wellington College