Famous Coffee Lovers

If there’s one thing people all over the world have in common, it’s drinking coffee. Many people get a kick out of ingesting this popular drink. Ordinary people and celebrities all hurry to get their morning fix of coffee every day regardless of where they are. To show you how popular coffee is, here’s a short list of famous coffee lovers who adore this beverage as much as we do.

Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) was a German composer, organist and violinist whose works include the Brandenburg concertos, the Goldberg Variations, the Partitas, and the Well-Tempered Clavier. But did you know that he loved coffee so much that he wrote a comic opera about it?

Schweigt stille, plaudert nicht ("Be still, stop chattering") or “The Coffee Cantata” was written between 1732 and 1734 and tells of society’s addiction to coffee which was common in 18th century Leipzig, the largest city in Germany. The cantata's libretto contains lines like "If I can't drink my bowl of coffee three times daily, then in my torment, I will shrivel up like a piece of roast goat." This sentiment was apparently shared by the patrons of Zimmerman's Coffee House in Leipzig where Bach was supposed to perform the work.

The French novelist and playwright Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850) was also a coffee lover who claimed the beverage gave him “restless energy.” He devoted several pages to coffee in an article that descried the stimulants of his time. Did this popular drink inspire him to create his magnum opus La Comédie humaine? We don’t know for sure but it is a fact that coffee keeps a person awake which can certainly help if one is writing a masterpiece.

Another coffee lover was the French writer and philosopher François-Marie Arouet (1694-1778) otherwise known as Voltaire. His passion for coffee was well-known and at one time he remarked: "I've been drinking coffee for over 50 years. That it is poison, I am convinced, but its ill effects have yet to have any bearing on my health."