--- title: "Coffee Was Banned in Three Continents at Different Points in History. The Reasons Were Always Political." id: "3813" type: "post" slug: "coffee-banned-history-political-reasons" published_at: "2026-11-01T00:27:00+00:00" modified_at: "2026-11-01T00:27:41+00:00" url: "https://beestrot.com/features/coffee-banned-history-political-reasons/" markdown_url: "https://beestrot.com/features/coffee-banned-history-political-reasons.md" excerpt: "Mecca in 1511, London in 1675, Prussia in 1777. Each time, a different authority decided coffee had to be stopped. Each time, the official reason was something other than the real one. The drink was never the problem." taxonomy_category: - "Features" - "Food Stories by Jean Louis" taxonomy_post_tag: - "Charles II" - "coffee ban" - "coffee history" - "coffeehouse" - "food-history" - "Frederick the Great" - "Ottoman Empire" - "political history" --- # Coffee Was Banned in Three Continents at Different Points in History. The Reasons Were Always Political. - November 1, 2026November 1, 2026 - by [Jean Louis](https://beestrot.com/author/jean-louis/) - [Features](https://beestrot.com/focus/features/) , [Food Stories by Jean Louis](https://beestrot.com/focus/features/food-stories-by-jean-louis/) ![Coffee Was Banned](https://beestrot.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/Coffee-Was-Banned.jpg "Coffee Was Banned in Three Continents at Different Points in History. The Reasons Were Always Political. 1") There is something almost suspicious about how many times, in how many different places, someone in authority decided that coffee needed to be stopped. Not taxed, not regulated, not discouraged. Banned. With penalties. In Mecca in 1511, the governor closed the coffeehouses and had the sacks of beans burned in the street. In London in 1675, Charles II issued a royal proclamation ordering all coffeehouses shut within eleven days. In Prussia in 1777, Frederick the Great deployed retired soldiers to walk the streets and sniff for the smell of illegal roasting. Three continents, three centuries, three very different political systems, and the same instinct: something about coffee needed to be controlled. What they were trying to control was rarely the drink. It was the room the drink was served in, and more precisely, the conversations happening inside it. ### Mecca, 1511: The Governor’s Real Problem The ban issued by Kair Bey, governor of Mecca, in 1511 was framed in religious terms. Coffee, he argued, produced a kind of intoxication and was therefore forbidden under Islamic law. He convened a council of scholars to rule on the question. The council was not entirely cooperative: some members pointed out that they had drunk coffee themselves without obvious moral deterioration. Kair Bey pushed through the ban regardless and had the coffeehouses closed. Sultan Selim I reversed the decision two years later from Cairo, ruling that coffee was in fact permissible. Historians reading the episode note that Kair Bey’s objection to coffeehouses was less theological than administrative: the coffeehouses of Mecca had become places where people gathered to talk, to play games, to discuss what was happening in the city and who was responsible for it. A governor who wants to maintain order has a natural interest in limiting the number of places where large numbers of people congregate outside his sight. The religious framing gave the ban a legitimacy it could not have claimed on political grounds alone. Mark Pendergrast’s account of coffee’s early spread in [Uncommon Grounds](#books) traces how this pattern, the coffeehouse as a political space wearing a social disguise, repeated itself from city to city across the Ottoman world over the following two centuries. > **The 1511 Mecca ban on coffee was framed as a religious ruling about intoxication. The Ottoman sultan reversed it two years later. What Kair Bey was actually concerned about was the coffeehouse as an unsupervised gathering space where people discussed public affairs without official oversight. The theology was the argument. The politics was the reason.** ### London, 1675: Eleven Days Charles II’s Proclamation for the Suppression of Coffee Houses, issued in December 1675, is one of the shortest-lived pieces of English legislation on record. It lasted eleven days before being quietly withdrawn. The proclamation named the coffeehouses as places where “Idle and disaffected persons” spread “False, Malitious and Scandalous Reports” against the king and his government. It ordered all coffeehouse keepers to close their establishments within ten days or face the consequences. The public response was immediate and overwhelming. By the time the ten days were up, it was clear that enforcement was not going to be possible and that attempting it would cause more political damage than the coffeehouses themselves. The ban was withdrawn on a promise from the coffeehouse keepers to prevent seditious talk on their premises, a promise enforced roughly as effectively as such promises always are. Stewart Lee Allen’s account of coffee’s collision with political authority in [The Devil’s Cup](#books) notes that the English coffeehouse in this period was functioning as something the country had not previously had: a genuinely public information space where news was read aloud, pamphlets circulated, and men of different stations mixed and argued. The Whig political network operated significantly through coffeehouse conversation. What Charles II wanted shut down was not the drink but the infrastructure of opposition. He failed, and within a generation, Lloyd’s of London had grown out of Edward Lloyd’s coffeehouse on Tower Street. > **Charles II’s 1675 ban on English coffeehouses lasted eleven days. The political infrastructure that had grown up around coffeehouse culture was too embedded to uproot by proclamation. What he was trying to suppress was not caffeine but the circulation of political opinion outside royal control. The coffeehouses survived. Lloyd’s of London is still open.** ### Prussia, 1777: The Coffee Sniffers Frederick the Great’s 1777 manifesto against coffee took a different approach. The Prussian case was not primarily about sedition. It was about economics: coffee was an imported luxury, and the money spent on it was leaving Prussia rather than circulating within it. Frederick wanted his subjects drinking beer, a domestic product whose production supported Prussian farmers and Prussian brewers. He was also, characteristically, concerned that coffee was replacing beer among the common soldiers and workers, which he believed was weakening them physically. His enforcement mechanism was the Kaffeeschnüffler, literally the coffee sniffers: retired soldiers granted the authority to patrol neighborhoods, enter premises, and investigate any suspected illegal roasting. The irony noted by Antony Wild in [Coffee: A Dark History](#books) is that the roasting of coffee produces one of the most recognisable aromas in the culinary world, making enforcement theoretically easier than for most contraband. In practice, the ban produced the usual results: a black market, widespread evasion, and a population that resented the government for a restriction they found both intrusive and absurd. Frederick kept the ban in place until his death in 1786. His successors did not continue it. > **Frederick the Great deployed retired soldiers to walk Prussian streets sniffing for illegal coffee roasting. The ban lasted until his death in 1786. His economic argument was coherent: coffee money was leaving Prussia. His enforcement was not. The smell of roasting coffee is hard to suppress and harder to mistake for anything else.** ### What Every Ban Had in Common The Ottoman bans, the English ban, and the Prussian ban share something beyond the object being restricted. In each case, the authority that issued the ban understood that what it was dealing with was not a vice in the conventional sense. Coffee produced no obvious impairment, inspired no violence, and generated no obvious social disorder of the kind associated with alcohol. What it generated was conversation. And conversation, in a space outside the home and outside official institutions, in a room where the same news reached people of different classes at the same time and where the response to it was immediate and collective, was genuinely threatening to those whose authority depended on controlling what people knew and said about them. The coffeehouse was the first mass medium that ran on participation rather than production. It did not require a printing press or a license or a royal patent. It required a room, some benches, and a fire. Every government that looked at it clearly saw the same thing: a place where it had no influence over what was being said. The drink was the excuse. The room was the problem. *Every dish has a past. I am just following it back to the beginning.* ***Jean Louis*** Every dish has a past. These books will take you further into it. [https://www.amazon.com/dp/1541699386?tag=beestrot08-20](https://www.amazon.com/dp/1541699386?tag=beestrot08-20) **[Uncommon Grounds](https://www.amazon.com/dp/1541699386?tag=beestrot08-20)** Mark Pendergrast [View on Amazon](https://www.amazon.com/dp/1541699386?tag=beestrot08-20) [https://www.amazon.com/dp/1641290102?tag=beestrot08-20](https://www.amazon.com/dp/1641290102?tag=beestrot08-20) **[The Devil’s Cup](https://www.amazon.com/dp/1641290102?tag=beestrot08-20)** Stewart Lee Allen [View on Amazon](https://www.amazon.com/dp/1641290102?tag=beestrot08-20) [https://www.amazon.com/dp/0393337391?tag=beestrot08-20](https://www.amazon.com/dp/0393337391?tag=beestrot08-20) **[Coffee: A Dark History](https://www.amazon.com/dp/0393337391?tag=beestrot08-20)** Antony Wild [View on Amazon](https://www.amazon.com/dp/0393337391?tag=beestrot08-20) **Sources** - [The surprising history of London’s lost coffeehouses, BBC Culture](https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20170530-the-surprising-history-of-londons-lost-coffeehouses) - [Coffee House Politics, History Today](https://www.historytoday.com/archive/coffee-house-politics) - [Coffeehouse, Encyclopaedia Britannica](https://www.britannica.com/topic/coffeehouse) - [A Brief History of the Coffeehouse, Smithsonian Magazine](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/a-brief-history-of-the-coffeehouse-180964621/) - [Coffee and Coffeehouses: The Origins of a Social Beverage in the Medieval Near East, William Ukers via JSTOR](https://www.jstor.org/stable/3590686) Share this article! [Set as Preferred Source](https://www.google.com/preferences/source?q=beestrot.com) Disclosure: This article may contain affiliate links. This means we may earn a commission if you click on a link and make a purchase at no extra cost to you. This applies to featured Amazon products or any other Beestrot's partners. I only link to products I would actually use in my own kitchen. Thank you for your support! Jean Louis. ### More Delicious Reads [Pasta Did Not Come From China. The Marco Polo Story Is a Myth. Here Is the Real One.](https://beestrot.com/features/pasta-not-from-china-marco-polo-myth/) [The Industry Convinced You Breakfast Is the Most Important Meal of the Day. It Was an Ad Campaign.](https://beestrot.com/features/breakfast-most-important-meal-ad-campaign/) [The French Did Not Invent French Fries. Belgium Is Still Angry About This.](https://beestrot.com/features/french-fries-not-french-belgium-history/) [Smoked Paprika and Sweet Paprika Are Not the Same Thing. 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