The Hidden History of Beverages

Why were some drinks blessed and taxed while others were banned?

From the water early hominids drank, through Aztec cacao and Sweden's five coffee bans, to the Opium Wars and a J.P. Morgan banker at a Mazatec healing ceremony, the first half of this book follows the drinks people have reached for — and finds that among drinks of comparable strength, whether a drink was blessed or banned had more to do with trade than with what it gives the people who drink it.

It also takes apart the stories we were told. The Ethiopian goatherd Kaldi and his dancing goats? The tale first appeared in print in Rome in 1671, and in the original the herder had no name and lived in Yemen. Coca-Cola never stopped buying coca leaf: around a hundred metric tons a year still arrive at a plant in New Jersey. The chemist who proved the Maya drank cacao worked for Hershey. And coffee is a crop that can't be backed up in the Svalbard seed vault.

The second half is for anyone looking for an alternative to coffee. Maybe it's your blood pressure. Maybe it's acid reflux, or a stomach that no longer puts up with the morning cup. Maybe it's the jitters, or sleep, or something you read about mold in coffee beans. Whatever the reason, there are two questions: what to drink instead, and who shouldn't drink it.

This book answers both.

It gives you 28 caffeine-free drinks made from leaves, flowers, berries, roots and bark: roasted chicory and dandelion root brewed like coffee, evening teas of lemon balm, chamomile and lavender, sea buckthorn, rosehip, hibiscus, ginger and ginseng. Every plant was checked against the herbal monographs of the European Medicines Agency — and where a plant has none, the chapter says so. Each recipe tells you what the plant can be used for and on what grounds, from what age or why no age limit is set, whether it suits pregnancy, and, where they are known, how long to drink it and which medicines it doesn't mix with. The book also sorts the 28: fifteen are everyday drinks, six are for the cold season, and seven are remedies taken on a course and then stopped.

Along the way you'll find out why peppermint, the classic stomach soother, can make reflux worse; why licorice, an old cough remedy, can raise your blood pressure; why hibiscus, which can lower it, still calls for a word with your doctor if you take blood-pressure pills; and what ginseng, the usual pick for "natural energy," can actually be used for, according to the European monographs.

Where a claim rests on tradition rather than clinical trials, the book says so. Facts, figures and quotations carry footnotes — 167 of them — to a bibliography of 145 sources, from seventeenth-century treatises to clinical trials and European Medicines Agency monographs.

AI-generated: the first edition was co-written by the author with the DeepSeek language model; this second edition was fact-checked and revised with Claude (Anthropic).