Anthropocene Mug

My Favorite coffee mug is ceramic, Like this one, but it’s printed with insults from Shakespeare’s plays. My favorite is “Thou crusty bag of nature”. From Troilus and Cressida. That one stings every time, because ultimately we’re all just crusty batches of nature. Someone gave me the mug in 2008, and I’ve sipped coffee from it nearly every day since. Of course, coffee snobs have a lot of strong mug opinions- some argue one should only drink from glasses, because glass allows you to see the coffee in all its splendor. Others say only ceramic will do, on account of how it retains heat slightly better. But of course most of us are not drinking coffee overly concerned about millijoules of heat lost through convection. We are drinking coffee because it allows us to become, and remain awake. Coffee beans have long been used for medicinal purposes, but the first recorded drinkers of coffee were 15th century Sufis in Yemen. They imported the beans from Ethiopia, roasted them, and then brewed coffee to help them stay awake during long sessions of prayer. Abd al-Qadir al-Jaziri wrote that these Muslim mystics would place their coffee “in a large vessel made of red clay.” if ceramic was good enough for their coffee mug, it’s good enough for mine. Coffee spread to the Middle East and Turkey by the sixteenth century, and then on to Europe and the Americas- although not without controversy. In 1674, an anonymous “petition against coffee” claimed, “Coffee leads men to trifle away their time, scald their chops, and spend their money, all for a little base black, thick, nasty, bitter, stinking nauseous puddle water.” I know that description is intended to turn the reader away from coffee, but it just makes me want a steaming hot mug of puddle water with which to scald my chops. At any rate, the petition was probably a part of a public relations campaign intended to discredit coffee, because English King Charles II felt threatened by the political talk that has long brewed over cups of coffee. His successor, James II, tried to ban newspapers from coffee shops in 1688 to prevent criticism of the king and his Absolutist Monarchy, but the Glorious Revolution came anyway, and with it a constitutional monarchy. That’s’ not to say, of course, that coffee can save the world. But it can revive this crusty bag of nature, and with a warm mug in my hands, I feel as Henry Ward Beecher did: “A cup of coffee is a match for twenty blue devils and will exorcise them all.” I give coffee mugs four and a half stars.