The History

Who decided which drinks could be drunk openly, and why — from the water our earliest ancestors walked to, past the first chewed bark and the first pot of anything, to coffee, tea, cacao and coca as the world trades them now.

CHAPTER 01 At the Origins: What Our Ancestors Drank What our earliest ancestors drank before anything was brewed — water, blood, milk, sap and fruit — and what the evidence can and cannot say about it. 7 footnotes · 7 sources CHAPTER 02 Before Brewing: What Was Chewed for What It Does The first evidence of taking a plant for what it does rather than as food — most of it from chimpanzees — and what tree bark contains. 3 footnotes · 3 sources CHAPTER 03 Fire, Pots and the Long Wait for Soup The long gap between the first fire and the first boiled drink, and what boiling changed. 3 footnotes · 3 sources CHAPTER 04 The First Tea: From Chewing the Leaf to Brewing It Where tea began, the oldest tea found by archaeologists, how pressed and aged tea came about, and what chemists find in tea today. 6 footnotes · 6 sources CHAPTER 05 Goats, Sufis and Seven Beans: The Origin Stories of Coffee Where the famous coffee origin stories come from, what coffee was before the roasted bean, and how Yemen lost its coffee monopoly. 2 footnotes · 2 sources Free CHAPTER 06 Conquistadors and Cacao: How a Sacred Drink Became a Sweet One How the bitter Aztec and Maya cacao drink became sweet European chocolate, how it was proved that the Maya drank cacao, and how cacao ceremonies are sold today. 11 footnotes · 10 sources Opening free CHAPTER 07 Blessed, Banned or Simply Ignored: What the Church Actually Prohibited Which consciousness-altering substances the Church actually banned, and why — fly agaric, peyote, mad honey, tobacco, opium, hashish and wine. 10 footnotes · 10 sources CHAPTER 08 The Tea Debt and the Opium Accounts How Britain’s demand for tea led to the opium trade and the Opium Wars, how Britain learned to grow its own tea, and how opium was finally ended in China. 11 footnotes · 9 sources CHAPTER 09 Taxed, Shipped Out or Outlawed: What Became of the Other Plants What became of local psychoactive plants while coffee and tea spread — yohimbe, coca, mate, coffee in Sweden and ayahuasca. 15 footnotes · 13 sources CHAPTER 10 Coca-Cola: How a Coca-Based Drink Became the Symbol of the Caffeine Era How Coca-Cola went from a coca and kola tonic to a caffeine drink, why it still uses coca leaf, and Bolivia’s fight over the leaf at the UN. 10 footnotes · 11 sources Opening free CHAPTER 11 Coffee in the Twenty-First Century: What Threatens It and Who Gets Paid Where Arabica comes from, what threatens coffee, why it cannot be saved in a seed vault, and who is paid for it. 6 footnotes · 6 sources CHAPTER 12 Corporations and Sacred Substances: How Spirituality Is Turned into a Commodity How sacred practices become products: Gordon Wasson and María Sabina, patents on psilocybin, and cacao ceremonies sold to tourists. 7 footnotes · 6 sources CHAPTER 13 What Caffeine Does to an Argument What research says about caffeine, psychedelics and the mind — persuasion, creativity, neural growth and political views. 4 footnotes · 4 sources CHAPTER 14 The End of Part One: What the History Adds Up To The conclusion of the history part: why coffee, tea and chocolate won, why other plants were banned, and what is changing now. 10 footnotes · 11 sources

The Hidden History of Beverages · second edition

Fourteen chapters of history. Twenty-eight drinks. Every claim sourced.

The e-book is on Apple Books, where the free sample has the same chapters as this site. If Apple Books doesn’t sell it where you live, “Other stores” shows the bookstores that do.

Get it on Apple Books Other stores