Everywhere in the world comes up with something hot and wet, boiled until safe and flavoured enough to overcome the local muddy water, with a stimulant steeped in.
What’s your favourite? How often does it appear in your works? Is it the centre of your character’s existence until sufficient quantities are achieved? Do you have the wise old mentor who might as well have the coffee mug permanently attached to his hand?
Or do they have a religious prohibition?
With the advent of technology and water filtration, much less carbonation, people have found ways around that to rival the consumption of slivovitz in Istanbul nightclubs. I have watched a gigantic cup of something fluorescent yellow appear on top of a lectern, and then a hand point to it with an exhausted voice greeting those of us also in the lecture hall at Oh-Bloody-Early, “Mormon lemonade.”
How do you envision the continuance of khat or caffeination in the far future or in your fantasy?
Mad Genius Club 
13 responses to “Coffee or Tea?”
Blame it on Islam. (Coffee as “the wine of Islam”.)
As background, I strongly recommend this excellent and readable book on the history of the Coffee-House. It makes clear that the existence of the stimulant caffeine is responsible for much more impact on economics/shipping/banking/religion/learned-societies/exchanges/science/health/alcoholism/etc., etc., etc., than you might ever have realized. Both coffee and tea share in this impact, with some significant differences.
Are there any cultures that give up mental stimulants, once they find them?
The fun part is that there really were efforts to ban coffee in Islam as a mind-altering drug.
I suspect that as long as people are people, there will be consumption of stimulants. The form may change and the social context, but it’ll still happen.
I don’t like booze and caffeine (beyond the microdoses in chocolate) doesn’t like me, so I don’t spend a lot of time on the subject of what my characters are drinking. I think my only reference to coffee is one character saying a woman’s eyes are like “coffee or chocolate. Something dark and stimulating from a far-off place at any rate.” I think there’s a few tea references in the Jaiya books but not many. Wine and cider come up in passing in the steampunk Dunedain thing.
Who here has seen the DS9 episode where the Ferengi go back in time and get involved in the Roswell incident, and there’s a somewhat goofy portrayal of the human smoking habits of the period? That’s how the paeans to coffee and its scifi analogues in a lot of fiction end up looking to me, but the vast majority of humans are going to find those scenes more relatable than I do.
“Little Green Men.” We just watched that episode last week.
They drink a lot of Klingon coffee in DS9 (raktajino), and over in Voyager Captain Janeway once spent an entire episode chasing elusive coffee into a nebula.
My current project is partially set in a Japan-style analogue so there is a lot of tea being drunk.
I remember Voyager being a lot closer to the print SF&F levels of obsession with coffee, although we still weren’t getting the two paragraphs of description of what your first caffeine intake of the day feels like. (People should feed their characters not-coffee or not-tea all they want, but please don’t make it the only successful piece of sensory writing in the whole book!)
Tea is my stimulant of preference among the “hot, wet, brewed/steeped” categories. Coffee with something to ease the bitterness if needed is my second favorite.
Most of my characters drink tea, with coffee as a secondary (aside from Lelia). I played with the idea of a genetically-engineered version of coffee that carries a strong chocolate taste as well in the Colplatschki series. Because as long as humans are genetically and culturally human, there will be morning people, night people, and the need to keep one from killing the other at 0-gads-awful-o’clock.
I prefer tea, but was told to back off when I suffered my first kidney stone. I have managed to get coffee drinkable, and prefer the low acid King Harve’s as they need the least adulteration to become drinkable.
While I personally don’t like coffee, in my books the Texas Navy, like the U.S. Navy, runs on the stuff. Although the close work with the Royal Navy may lead to an uptick in tea drinking.
I thought the RN ran on rum.
Although the rum ration is no more, the RN ship I visited had beer for the enlisted and a full bar for the officers.
I don’t drink it much myself, but in one short set of stories I did (well, fanfic, not real stories) I had sapient dragons from a fantasy setting getting introduced to coffee on Earth. Which leads to coffee being made for the fire lizards that is strong enough to float an axe head in and more potent than the Cuban and South Egyptian stuff I’ve heard of.
And it leads to complaints from other humans that we’re corrupting the dragons’ pure and untainted culture with the demon bean.
LOL 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
I was mainly inspired by something from L. Sprague De Camp’s Krishna stories, and how despite the best efforts of the Viagens Interplanterias Terran culture and vices slipped through to the aliens they were “protecting”.
In the setting I was writing in physical travel from Earth to the magical beings’ realm was impossible — it would kill humans who tried — but cultural bits like songs, jokes, stories, etc. went back and forth with ease.