Famous Coffee Drinkers in History: Fact or Fiction?

Case 01 · French novelist, 1799 to 1850

Honoré de Balzac

The legend  He drank 50 cups of coffee a day.

Exaggerated

The record

The figure is everywhere, yet nobody has traced it to Balzac or to anyone who knew him. The afterword to the Wakefield Press translation of his Treatise on Modern Stimulants notes that his bills and receipts point to less than three kilograms a month, perhaps 10 to 15 cups a day. A lot, but nowhere near 50.

The real story is better. In that 1839 treatise, Balzac describes what he calls a “terrible and cruel method”: coffee ground very fine, packed down, with almost no water, swallowed on an empty stomach. The result, he wrote, sent ideas marching like the battalions of an army on a battlefield. He wrote through the night, usually from midnight until morning, and died in 1850 at just 51.

Case 02 · Composer, 1770 to 1827

Ludwig van Beethoven

The legend  He counted out exactly 60 beans for every cup.

Probably true

The record

It comes from Anton Schindler, Beethoven’s secretary, in his 1840 biography: “He allowed sixty beans for each cup, and lest his measure should mislead him to the amount of a bean or two, he made it a rule to count over the sixty for each cup, especially when he had visitors.”

The catch is the witness. Schindler is known to have forged entries in Beethoven’s conversation books, so historians treat his anecdotes with care. Still, bean counting is an oddly specific, unflattering detail with no obvious motive behind it. Probably true, with an asterisk.

Case 03 · French writer, 1694 to 1778

Voltaire

The legend  He drank 40 to 50 cups a day and told his doctor coffee must be a very slow poison, since it had taken decades to kill him.

Legend

The record

The comeback is real, but it was not Voltaire’s. Quote Investigator traced the earliest known version to a French almanac from 1780, two years after Voltaire died, and that version credits Bernard de Fontenelle, another long lived French writer. The Voltaire version turns up in 1807.

As for 40 to 50 cups, there is no primary source behind the number at all. Voltaire may well have loved coffee, but the joke and the cup count attached themselves to him after he was gone.

Case 04 · Composer, 1685 to 1750

Johann Sebastian Bach

The legend  Bach wrote a comic piece about a young woman who refuses to give up coffee.

True

The record

It exists, and it is still performed. Schweigt stille, plaudert nicht, catalogued as BWV 211 and better known as the Coffee Cantata, was composed in Leipzig around 1734 to a text by the poet Picander. It was most likely first performed by Bach’s Collegium Musicum at Zimmermann’s coffee house, so the audience may well have been holding cups.

The plot is a sitcom. A grumpy father threatens his daughter Liesgen with no husband unless she quits coffee. She sings that coffee is sweeter than a thousand kisses, agrees, then lets it be known that any suitor must promise her coffee whenever she likes.

Case 05 · Danish philosopher, 1813 to 1855

Søren Kierkegaard

The legend  He owned dozens of coffee cups and drank his coffee poured over a mountain of sugar.

True

The record

This one holds up. Israel Levin, who worked as Kierkegaard’s secretary in the 1840s, recalled that the philosopher owned at least fifty sets of cups and saucers, but only one of each sort. Before coffee, Levin had to choose which cup to use and explain why he had chosen it.

Biographer Joakim Garff describes the ritual that followed: sugar piled into the cup until it rose above the rim, then very strong black coffee poured over it to slowly dissolve the white pyramid. The precise sugar counts quoted online have no reliable source, so we left them out.

Case 06 · King of Prussia, 1712 to 1786

Frederick the Great

The legend  He hired spies to sniff out illegal coffee roasting.

True

The record

Frederick resented money leaving Prussia for imported coffee, and a widely quoted 1777 manifesto has him declaring that his people must drink beer. The exact wording has been questioned, but what came next is documented in William Ukers’ classic 1922 history of coffee.

In 1781 the king made roasting a royal monopoly, with permits for nobles, clergy and officials but not most ordinary people. Discharged wounded soldiers were hired to patrol the streets, follow the smell of roasting coffee and catch anyone without a permit, in exchange for a quarter of the fine. Prussians had a name for them: the coffee smellers.

Case 07 · Reigned 1771 to 1792

King Gustav III of Sweden

The legend  He ran the first clinical trial on coffee, using twin convicts, one drinking coffee daily and the other tea.

Legend

The record

The story is irresistible: the supervising doctors die, the king is assassinated, and the tea drinker dies first, at 83. No records from the period describe any such experiment, and Swedish sources consider it highly doubtful.

The background is true. Sweden taxed coffee from 1746 and banned it several times over the following decades, and Gustav III really was shot at a masked ball in 1792. The twins look like a later invention grown out of a very real national argument.

Case 08 · Pope from 1592 to 1605

Pope Clement VIII

The legend  Advisers urged him to ban coffee as the drink of Muslims, but he tasted it, loved it and baptized it instead.

Legend

The record

It has been retold so often that it feels official, but no document records any papal decision about coffee, and historians generally treat the tale as legend.

What it captures is real: coffee reached Europe through Venetian trade as a foreign curiosity, met suspicion, then won people over one cup at a time.

Case 09 · U.S. president, 1858 to 1919

Theodore Roosevelt

The legend  He drank a gallon of coffee a day and coined the slogan “good to the last drop.”

Half true

The record

The love of coffee is real. His son Ted Jr. wrote that his father “was very fond of coffee and always had a special cup. It was so large it was more in the nature of a bathtub.” The gallon a day, however, has no source we could find.

The slogan is the weakest part. Roosevelt did visit Nashville and Andrew Jackson’s Hermitage on October 21, 1907, but the Theodore Roosevelt Center has found no contemporary evidence that he said those words, and the attribution only appears decades later. Bathtub cup, yes. Advertising copywriter, no.