Drinks That Changed History

Drinks That Changed History: Tea, coffee, rum, beer, wine and spirits have funded empires, sparked rebellions, paid laborers and shaped global trade routes, making what people drink one of the hidden forces behind war, revolution and daily life.

Boston Tea Party: In 1773 colonists dumped 342 chests of East India Company tea into Boston Harbor, a protest over taxation that pushed Britain and the colonies toward revolution.

First Opium War: Britain's craving for Chinese tea drained its silver, so it pushed opium into China to balance trade, leading to the 1839 war that ended with Hong Kong in British hands.

Robert Fortune: In 1848 this Scottish botanist disguised himself to travel into China's tea country and smuggled out plants and expert workers, helping launch India's tea industry.

Kaldi: Legend says this Ethiopian goatherd discovered coffee after noticing his goats dancing with energy after eating red berries from a certain shrub.

Lloyd's of London: The world famous insurance market began in Edward Lloyd's coffee house in the 1680s, where merchants and ship captains gathered to swap shipping news and underwrite voyages.

Cafe de Foy: On July 12, 1789, journalist Camille Desmoulins leapt onto a table outside this Paris cafe and urged the crowd to arms, two days before the storming of the Bastille.

Gabriel de Clieu: In the 1720s this French naval officer carried a coffee seedling to Martinique, reportedly sharing his own water ration with it, and its descendants spread across the Americas.

Edward Vernon: In 1740 the British admiral ordered sailors' rum watered down, and the mix was named grog after his nickname Old Grog, taken from his grogram cloak.

Rum Rebellion: In 1808 officers of the New South Wales Corps, who profited from trading rum, overthrew Governor William Bligh, the only successful armed takeover of government in Australian history.

Molasses Act: Britain's 1733 tax on foreign molasses, the raw material for colonial rum, was so widely smuggled around that its tougher replacement in 1764 helped ignite colonial anger.

Whiskey Rebellion: When Pennsylvania farmers revolted against a federal whiskey tax in 1794, George Washington led about 13,000 militia to crush it, one of the only times a sitting president has personally led troops in the field.

Mayflower: A Pilgrim account says the ship's passengers chose to land at Plymouth in 1620 partly because their supplies, especially their beer, were running low.

Hymn to Ninkasi: This Sumerian song to the goddess of beer, written down around 1800 BC, doubles as one of the oldest surviving beer recipes.

Pyramids of Giza: The workers who built them received daily rations that included several liters of beer, a nutritious and safer alternative to much of the available water.

Gin Lane: William Hogarth's 1751 print of a London street ruined by cheap gin helped push Parliament to pass the Gin Act that same year, ending the worst of the Gin Craze.

Indian Tonic Water: British officers in India mixed bitter quinine, which fights malaria, with soda, sugar and gin, creating the gin and tonic as a way to make their medicine go down.

John Pemberton: When Atlanta went dry in 1886, the pharmacist reworked his alcoholic French Wine Coca into a nonalcoholic syrup and called it Coca-Cola.

Volstead Act: The law enforcing Prohibition from 1920 to 1933 fueled organized crime empires like Al Capone's and cost the government an estimated billions in lost tax revenue.

Mikhail Gorbachev: His 1985 anti-alcohol campaign ripped up vineyards and slashed vodka sales, draining state revenue and making him deeply unpopular as the Soviet economy faltered.

Barbe-Nicole Ponsardin: The widow behind Veuve Clicquot perfected the riddling rack for clearing champagne and smuggled a shipment to Russia in 1814 ahead of rivals, making her bubbly the toast of the Russian court.

Great French Wine Blight: From the 1860s a tiny aphid called phylloxera destroyed a huge share of Europe's vineyards, which were saved only by grafting vines onto resistant American rootstock.

Moctezuma II: The Aztec emperor was said to drink frothy cacao from golden cups, and cacao beans were valuable enough to be used as currency across Mesoamerica.

William Sealy Gosset: While working as a brewer at Guinness, he invented the Student's t-test in 1908 to improve beer quality, publishing under a pen name because Guinness kept its methods secret.

PepsiCo: In a 1989 barter deal with the Soviet Union, Pepsi received 17 old submarines and several warships in exchange for soda, briefly controlling one of the larger navies in the world before selling them for scrap.