[Sca-cooks] A college class... on Coffee

[Jadwiga Zajaczkowa / Jenne Heise]

Someone said

> >> I think there may be a cultural tradition for hot drinks in period,
> >> but not associated with a caffeine rush, so...

Someone replied

> >The alehouse replaced the tabernae later in period (more likely
> >was just another incurrence of the same style of business, not
> >a direct descendant) and
> >then the coffeehouse was a branch off of that same tree when
> >coffee arrived on the scene in the 1600's.

_Coffee and coffeehouses : the origins of a social beverage in the 
Medieval Near East_ by Ralph S. Hattox 

talks extensively about the whole coffeehouse thing in the Middle East 
and how the Muslim theologians said it was alright to drink coffee if 
you didn't drink it in the same fashion as one would drink wine-- that 
is, if coffee was a beverage used to improve concentration for 
meditation and prayer, it was all right, but drinking coffee socially, 
especially in coffee houses, was like drinking wine and therefore wrong.

There's some interesting stuff about the development of Taverns in a 
book I just ILL'd... here's a section I've already transcribed into my 
blog:

>From Beer in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, by Richard W. Unger 
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2004):

    "In fourteenth-century Hamburg, the town formalized the connections 
between brewery and tavern, ordering that beer could be served for the 
public only in the house where it was brewed. Such extreme restrictions 
were rare. Tavern keepers who were not brewers were often poor and had 
to ge credit from their supplier. Tied by debt to a certain brewer, they 
also became tied as the seller of that brewer's beer. Since taverns were 
continuing institutions and often in convenient locations, next to 
markets or on harbors, they became places to meet and to do business. 
Tavern keepers were generally legally free businessmen and 
businesswomen, often invested with certain public functions including 
the collection of tolls and of taxes, and not just on beer. In Poland, 
law courts and even moneyers operated, on occasion, in taverns. Polish 
tavern keepers enjoyed higher status as a result of the varied functions 
of their institution. Tavern keepers usually operated on what amounted 
to a license from a lord who let the tavern operate on payment of a fee. 
Outside of Poland, taverns may not have played such a prominent role in 
the local and regional economy, but taverns were, at least by the 
thirteenth century, a common part of life in much of northern and 
eastern Europe. By the thirteenth century, Polish taverns, as their 
numbers increased and the economy developed, became more like taverns in 
England and the Low Countries, existing less as centers of business and 
administration and more as meeting places for the amusement of farmers 
and peasants." p.51

-- 
-- Jadwiga Zajaczkowa, Knowledge Pika jenne at fiedlerfamily.net 
"Information wants to be a Socialist... not a Communist or a 
Republican." - Karen Schneider