Answer: Wake up and smell the 19th century coffee?

[Dan Russell]

Wednesday, July 30, 2025

Answer: Wake up and smell the 19th century coffee?

Interesting challenge... 

An AI generated image that's intentionally slightly misleading.  (So don't waste time mining this image for clues.  Read the Challenge below!)

As I mentioned, this is one of those Interesting Challenges.  Usually, the Interesting Challenges are some fascinating aspect of the world--or, as in this case, of history.  

Here's the Challenge: I came across a claim in my reading that struck me as so strange and bizarre that I had to SRS the claim.  Is this true?  If so, can you find reasonable evidence for it?  

1. I read that during 19th century Germany, it was prohibited to roast coffee beans without official royal approval. One couldn't import, roast, grind, or sell coffee to the masses.  What's more (and even stranger, which is what makes this a fun Challenge), the government employed people whose job was to literally sniff out illicit coffee production.  Since it's hard to hide the smell of coffee roasting, it seems unlikely!  So the big question is:  Was this a real thing?  If so, who, when, where, and most of all, WHY?  

After doing my SearchResearch (described below), the bottom line is this.... 

Yes, it's all true--except it was in Prussia during the 18th century.  (Note sure where the error crept in, but it's a good point to remember--the basic question might have incorrect information built into it!) 

In Prussia, coffee became widely popular in the mid-1700s. The government became concerned with the economic implications of coffee consumption because coffee had to be imported, costing Prussia some serious money which they could ill afford to lose. 

Frederick II (aka, Frederick the Great; ruled 1740–1786) created strict regulations with royal monopolies and prohibitions on private roasting and selling of coffee beans.  Yes, average Prussian could have and drink coffee, but the government didn't want people roasting their own beans--that was something they wanted to control.  

The situation escalated dramatically in 1777 when he issued his famous anti-coffee manifesto, reaching the point of peak coffee suppression by setting up an agency to find illicit coffee roasters. They used around 400 disabled war veterans as "coffee sniffers" (German: Kaffeeriecher or Kaffeeschnüffler), so it was also a vets jobs program!  

What I did to find this... 

I have to admit that I did my research the old-fashioned way, with queries like [German coffee sniffer 19th century].  

That way worked pretty well, but as Regular Reader Arthur Weiss pointed out, one can copy/paste the entire Challenge into a LLM (he used Perplexity) and generate an answer.  You can read Perplexity's answer to the Challenge here.  To his credit, Arthur then verified the claims by examining the links given in the article.  2 go to Wikipedia, and 1 goes to a German museum, and 1 goes to a Mashable article that's well-written, with links to resources of its own.  

Motivated by Arthur's example, I did the same thing with Google Gemini and got very similar results. (Link to Gemini's answer.)  I also checked the citations, but there were only 2... and while they were fine, they left me wondering if we couldn't improve the situation.  

So, yeah--the AIs are doing a pretty good job with this Challenge. 

Is there something else one could do to improve the SRS process?  Sure! One obvious thing occurs to me.  Since this is a German language topic, perhaps it would make sense to search in German!  

Just searching for the term Kaffeeriecher on the English language Google doesn't do much that's different.  But if you change the LANGUAGE of the search results, you do get different results.  

Here's how to change the search language:  Under the TOOLS menu (on the right side), go to "Advanced Search," which will then give you the option to select your "Narrow your results by..."  Then select "German."    

This gives you only German language results.  In this case, the German-only results led me to a few additional results from reputable German-language sources.  (Including some contemporary ones, which were fairly amusing.)  

This also led me to read (in translation) the German Wikipedia article, which points to The Coffee Noise of Paderborn in 1781.  The article tells us that  “On February 25, 1777, he issued an edict which forbade the bourgeoisie, peasants, and lower officials from buying and using coffee, and declared it henceforth only a privileged beverage for the nobility, the clergy, and higher officials.”  This was the Edict of Paderborn.  

“His Royal Majesty Himself had been raised on beer soup as a youth, so people could just as well be raised on beer soup"; it was much healthier than the coffee to which "every farmer and common man" had now become accustomed. To achieve his goal, he introduced a fairly high coffee tax and established a special coffee administration, whose officials were popularly called 'coffee sniffers.' (Kaffeeriecher)"

The edict also includes the penalties for illegal coffee use:  

"5) If it is found that one or another person, who is allowed to use coffee, has given away coffee either publicly or secretly for money, or sold it in portions, or had it given away or sold by his family, he shall also [ 97 ] incur a penalty of 10 Reichsthalers each time, and shall be liable to immediate execution."  

Pretty serious stuff. 

As you might have predicted, “Coffee parties flourished…” as the locals objected to the increased price of coffee and the imposition of the Kaffeeriecher.  

Out of curiosity, I also translated the Challenge into German and asked Gemini for its response.  Happily, it gave the response in German as well, though I didn't learn anything different on this attempt.

I also did an Image search for [Kaffeeriecher] which gave me several images that I've montaged into a single image here: 

Various images of coffee sniffers breaking in on women's coffee parties, entering a home to search for illegal coffee, and a cartoon showing a Kaffeeriecher smelling out all forms of coffee.

You can see where the Image Gen model got its inspiration!  The top two images are the most common pictures of Prussian coffee sniffers out there.  

SearchResearch Lessons

There are a couple of lessons to take away... 

1. When you've got a longish text for the Challenge, it might well be a great AI question to pose.  Both Perplexity and Gemini did decent jobs on this Challenge. 

2. For topics that are obviously in a specific language, consider switching to that language to search for results.  You can often find much more content, and will certainly find more original content than you will find in translation.  

3. Remember that errors can creep into the statement of the Challenge.  The Kaffeeriechers weren't from the 19th century, but creatures of the 18th century.  It's a big difference.  

4. Consider looking at Images for additional ideas.

Keep searching! 

--

Daniel M. Russell 

Check out my book:  The Joy of Search (2019) 

Available in fine bookstores (and online) everywhere.