RangerJoe
Posts: 13450
Joined: 11/16/2015
From: My Mother, although my Father had some small part.
Status: offline
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Orm, did they teach you this in Swedish history?
Once upon a time, when coffee was illegal in Sweden... say what now?
quote:
Congratulations! You've been selected to travel back in time. Unfortunately, you're being transported to a time in Swedish history when coffee was illegal. But, hey, you can at least take comfort knowing that there will be plenty of people waiting to greet you holding a sign reading, "Welcome to Hell".
Okay, not exactly. But they might very well be holding funerals for coffee pots, as was done on 1 August 1794, when the Swedish government passed yet another ban on the importation and consumption of coffee – the fourth of five enacted between 1756 and 1817. By this point, many people were understandably at their wit's end. Justifiably, too, since a caffeine fix was pretty hard to get otherwise.
One British traveler to Sweden, Dr. Thomas Thomson, wrote glowingly of Swedish coffee in 1812 (a time when it was legal), "You can get coffee in the meanest peasant's house and it is always excellent," but despairingly of the alternative, "Swedish tea is just as bad as their coffee is good".
"The Swedish tea is so weak," he wrote, as if beginning a bad joke, "that happening one evening to sit by the lady who was pouring it out, it struck me that she had actually forgot to put in any tea, and was pouring out nothing but hot water…".
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Not surprisingly, during times of coffee prohibition, people managed to figure out ways of getting coffee, even on pain of having their cups and dishes confiscated as a punishment. If you happened to be a prisoner facing execution, you might even have your sentence commuted so you could become a royal guinea pig, as when King Gustav III supposedly "experimented" with identical twin prisoners.
In what is facetiously called Sweden's first clinical trial, one of the twin brothers was forced to drink large amounts of coffee every day while the other was made to drink equal amounts of tea in order to prove coffee shortened life. As it turned out, the King died first, by assassination, in 1792, followed by the two doctors appointed to oversee the experiment. The tea-drinking prisoner died at the ripe-old age of 83. The last to go – nobody quite knows when – was the one who was supposed to experience an early and agonizing death by coffee.
https://www.thelocal.se/20180702/why-coffee-was-banned-in-sweden-five-times
_____________________________
Seek peace but keep your gun handy.
I'm not a complete idiot, some parts are missing!
“Illegitemus non carborundum est (“Don’t let the bastards grind you down”).”
― Julia Child
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