A History of the World in 6 Glasses by Tom Standage

When I retired at the end of June, my congregation did several nice things for me, including giving me several gifts: a potted plant, a hat. Friends gave me a bottle of scotch and a bottle of champagne. Fittingly, a member of the church gave me this book. I read it during a trip earlier this month to visit my father in Waynesville, NC. Jim and I also spent a few lovely days in Asheville, and then in Chicago, where I read a little off and on. I finished the book waiting at the gate in the Chicago airport.

The six historical glasses in order, are: beer, wine, spirits, coffee, tea, and Coca-Cola. It’s a neat idea and an interesting book.

Beer is the earliest beverage, arising at the same time and in the same Fertile Crescent where civilization began as early humans switched from nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyles to permanent settlements around agriculture. When they starting leaving barley and other grains in storage some of them would inevitably ferment, et voila!

Wine is next. Wine grapes originated in the mountainous areas north of the fertile crescent, so wine had to be transported to the drinkers and thus was more expensive and became an elite drink. Standage describes the wine drinking culture of Greece and then of Rome: the symposium and the convivial.

Distillation, known in ancient time but only adopted generally in the middle ages, allows for higher alcohol content. Rum, distilled from sugar, becomes part of the fuel that runs the slave and sugar trade between Europe, Africa, and the new world. I learned that grog is a cocktail made when Admiral Edward Vernon added lime juice and sugar to rum to make it more palatable. Today we’d call that drink a Caipirinha. They named the drink after his nickname, “Old Grogam” because he wore a waterproof coat made of grogam: a coarse fabric stiffened with gum (p. 109). The lime juice incidentally helped prevent scurvy, which made the British sailors healthier than the French sailors who drank wine, and thus helped lead to British dominance at sea. American colonists also drank rum, but as the settlers spread westward and got farther removed from sea ports where rum was easily available, they started making spirits from other grains, such as rye, and eventually corn to make bourbon.

I had always thought coffee was a New World plant. I learned coffee was initially from Arabia. It was only later transported to Java, by the Dutch, and the Caribbean and then Central America by the English. The story of how coffee fueled the enlightenment in English coffee houses was well known to me. I hadn’t known that coffee houses developed their own special characters, one house for writers, another for scientists, a house for politicians, a house for bankers and so on. It’s from gatherings in specialized coffee houses that institutions like Lloyds of London, or the stock exchange have their founding. Eventually, the mixed economic-class coffee houses evolved in two directions: the upper class coffee houses morphed into the gentlemen’s clubs, the lower class houses became pubs.

The story of how tea replaced coffee was fascinating to me. As the British Empire spread around the globe they encountered tea in China and brought it back to Europe. Catherine of Braganza, the daughter of the King of Portugal was a tea drinker. When she married Charles II in 1662 she brought her tea drinking habit to the English court. Of course, as always happens, everyone wanted to emulate the royals, so aristocratic women started drinking tea. The coffee houses had only admitted men, but the tea shops that sprung up allowed women to drink tea, and also to buy tea that they could serve at home. Women entertained at afternoon teas with a light meal. Eventually laborers adopted the habit, grabbing their tea at the pub after work left off for the day, standing at the bar or sitting on bar stools, thus “high tea.”

The story of Coca-Cola starts with carbonated beverages. Carbonation was discovered in 1767 by the British clergyman Joseph Priestly. (Standage fails to note that Priestly was a Unitarian clergyman.) Like the other drinks Standage covers, carbonated water was initially promoted for its supposed health benefits. Coca-Cola began as a patent medicine created by a man named Pemberton in the Atlanta area in the late nineteenth century. He combined the Coca leaf, including trace amounts of cocaine, with the Kola nut, containing caffeine, and other ingredients into a syrup that could be added to carbonated water. Coca-Cola spread through a remarkable series of lucky circumstances: prohibition created a market for soft drinks, World War II spread Coca-Cola around the globe and associated the drink with American values. Standage debunks the story that Coca-Cola advertisers invented the character of Santa Claus in 1931; the character had already been standardized in 1927, but does relate how that advertising campaign helped market the drink to children even though Coca-Cola had agreed as the result of a 1911 lawsuit not to include images of children drinking the beverage in its advertising, a policy they continued until 1986.

Standage ends his book with an Epilogue that could easily be a seventh “glass”. He sees that the era of Coca-Cola and soft drinks is ending. Sales of carbonated beverages in the United States peaked in 2004 and have been declining ever since. Instead we’re entering an era of water. Bottled water sells as a luxury in places where tap water is perfectly safe to drink, while clean water availability is still an issue in other places, and climate change affects water supplies everywhere. The six “glasses” Standage explores all established themselves as healthy, or healthier, alternatives to water, but never replaced it, of course, as the essential life-giver it is.

The book is fun. The anecdotes are interesting. Standage is a journalist, and writes like one, so the prose is serviceable and clear. Each “glass” is given two chapters, one about the origins of the drink, the second about the modern version. Every chapter ends with a paragraph summary of the material so the main facts are easy to retain.

As a man who enjoys his spirits, and his coffee, but hardly ever drinks wine or beer and never tea (unless I’m sick) or Coke (I drink Ginger Ale on a plane, and tonic water with gin, but that’s pretty much it for carbonated beverages) I enjoyed the book very much and very much appreciated the thoughtful gift from my former congregant.