The Great Composer’s Mysterious Morning Ritual

Imagine counting out exactly 60 coffee beans every single morning before brewing your coffee. For Ludwig van Beethoven, this wasn’t just a quirky habit—it was an obsession that bordered on the compulsive. One persistent anecdote tells that he used precisely 60 beans for his coffee, though historians still debate whether this famous story is entirely true. What we do know is that one cup of Beethoven’s coffee contained approximately 360 milligrams of caffeine, nearly equivalent to five shots of Starbucks espresso. That’s enough caffeine to power through composing symphonies that would echo through centuries.
Coffee as Currency and Social Bribery

Coffee wasn’t just Beethoven’s fuel for creativity—it was also used as a means of bribery in his household. The composer wrote angrily about how his nephew Karl’s mother bribed servants with sugar, coffee, and cash to gain access to the boy, despite Beethoven forbidding it. Coffee beans were quite expensive at the time, and preparing coffee at home was not the norm but rather reserved to the upper class, which was not exactly the case of Beethoven, who lived modestly his whole life. This makes his coffee obsession even more remarkable—he was essentially splurging on liquid gold every morning.
The Mysterious Glass Coffee Machine

Beethoven usually prepared his coffee in a “glass coffee maker,” described by his biographer using the unique word “Glasmaschine”. This detail has coffee historians scratching their heads, wondering what exactly this contraption was. Did he boil the water in it? Was it a Siphon, a French press, a Chemex maybe? Hot water would be poured through the ground coffee via what has been described as a “glass contraption,” and due to modern processing, the caffeine content in Beethoven’s coffee was likely far greater than what we would enjoy today. This mysterious brewing method adds another layer to the composer’s already eccentric reputation.
Voltaire’s 40-Cup-a-Day Addiction

Voltaire, the famous satirist who wrote “Candide,” is perhaps one of the most avid coffee addicts in history, reportedly consuming somewhere between 40 and 50 cups of joe a day of a chocolate-coffee mixture, and he lived into his eighties though his doctor warned him that his beloved coffee would kill him. Think your morning double shot is intense? Voltaire was basically running on pure caffeine and wit. His doctor’s warnings proved wrong—perhaps all that coffee actually preserved him like some sort of caffeinated mummy.
Bach’s Coffee Comedy

Johann Sebastian Bach wrote a short opera about coffee obsession, and the famed Baroque composer was also a notable coffee fiend who turned an amusing poem by his frequent collaborator, Picander, into The Coffee Cantata in 1732, which mocked public outcry about the rise of the Vienna coffeehouse scene. In his Coffee Cantata, a father demands that his daughter give up her coffee addiction so that she can find a suitable husband, but she ultimately decides to marry only when she has found someone who loves coffee as much as she. Talk about finding your perfect match—forget compatibility tests, just check their coffee consumption habits.
Kierkegaard’s Sugar Mountain

Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard took his coffee with approximately 30 sugar cubes, piling a mountain of sugar into his cup then pouring black coffee in to dissolve it, and he also had 50 different coffee cups, asking his secretary to select one and give a valid philosophical reason for his choice. Imagine being Kierkegaard’s secretary and having to philosophically justify why today feels like a “blue porcelain with delicate rose pattern” kind of morning. His coffee ritual was less about caffeine and more about turning breakfast into an existential exercise.
Teddy Roosevelt’s Gallon-a-Day Habit

The 26th U.S. president Teddy Roosevelt would typically drink a gallon of coffee a day, adding five to seven lumps of sugar to the drink, though he eventually switched to saccharine. A gallon of coffee daily—that’s roughly 16 cups. No wonder Roosevelt had the energy to charge up San Juan Hill and establish national parks. His coffee consumption makes modern energy drink addicts look like amateurs.
Elvis and His Four-Pound Sandwich Obsession

In 1976, Elvis was in Colorado when he stumbled upon one of his signature favorite meals at a restaurant, the “Fool’s Gold” sandwich: a long baguette filled with peanut butter, grape jelly, and bacon weighing in at about four pounds, costing him what would be around $206 today, and he even made his staff fly from Memphis, TN, to Denver to retrieve it for him one night. Picture this: the King of Rock and Roll so desperately craving a sandwich that he sent his private jet across multiple states. That’s not just hunger—that’s dedication to your culinary obsessions.
Howard Hughes’ Germ-Phobic Food Rituals

Howard Hughes suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorder which was reflected in his eating habits, giving bizarre food preparation orders to his servants, including wrapping spoon handles in tissue paper, sealing them with cellophane and wrapping in a second piece of tissue paper, only touching the covered handles because he was obsessively afraid of germs. His servants had to open cans of food in a specific way: first holding the can under warm running water, using a brush and special bars of soap to remove the label 5 centimeters from the top, then soaking the can to remove dust and germs, cleaning the bottom the same way, and scrubbing all indentations with soap. Opening a can of soup became a surgical procedure in Hughes’ world.
Henry Ford’s Wild Weed Experiments

Henry Ford was a picky eater who usually had nuts or raisins in his pocket, and in his youth was largely uninterested in food, mostly moving it around on his plate to give the appearance of eating it, but this changed when he started to perceive his body as a machine and his stomach as a boiler that needed the right fuel, experimenting with wild weeds as a source of nutrition, causing misery to his business associates. Ford treated eating like an engineering problem—if only he’d applied the same efficiency to his dining habits as he did to the assembly line, maybe his dinner guests wouldn’t have suffered through courses of foraged weeds.
Lord Byron’s Vinegar Diet Craze

While studying at Cambridge University, the poet Lord Byron became worried about his weight and would therefore only dine on biscuits, potatoes, water, and apple cider vinegar, covering all of his meals in the vinegar, and after losing 60 pounds, the method became one of the earliest celebrity endorsed fad diets. Byron was essentially the first influencer promoting extreme diet hacks on what would have been Georgian-era social media. His vinegar obsession makes modern detox trends look positively reasonable.
Einstein’s Grasshopper Snacks

Though Albert Einstein’s love of mushrooms and eggs was pretty normal, the time-honored genius was once caught by his chauffeur enjoying a bite of grasshopper, then washing it down with a nice glass of celery juice. Even the man who revolutionized physics had some unconventional snacking habits. Maybe there’s something to be said for thinking outside the box—or in Einstein’s case, outside the typical protein sources.
Louis Armstrong’s Lifelong Laxative Ritual

As a child, jazz trumpet player Louis Armstrong’s mother would often instruct the family to eat laxatives with their meals because the only food they could afford was usually slightly rotten, and Armstrong continued to do so his whole life, often offering his favorite herbal supplement to friends. What started as a childhood necessity became a lifelong habit, showing how early food experiences can shape our entire relationship with eating. Armstrong’s friends probably never knew what to expect when he offered them his “special health supplements.”
Mussolini’s Banquet Boycotts

Benito Mussolini had weird eating habits, such as refusing to eat anything at banquets, believing that eating was an activity to which one should devote one’s complete attention and that eating in the presence of others would make one “apt to eat wrongly”. His diet was mainly composed of fruit and up to 3 liters (1 gallon) of milk every day. Imagine being invited to dine with a dictator who refuses to actually eat at dinner parties. Mussolini turned mealtime into a philosophical statement about focus and attention—though his extreme milk consumption suggests he might have had his own obsessions brewing.
The Truth Behind Historical Food Legends

The internet is full with the story of Beethoven and his sixty coffee beans, and according to this legend he counted exactly sixty beans, sometimes even double checking them, before making his own cup of coffee, though there is no credible evidence for this anecdote. Many of these historical food stories walk the line between fact and folklore, passed down through generations like culinary fairy tales. The internet is full of fascinating stories, sometimes too good to be true, and most of the time very approximate, if not totally wrong, as it tends to infinitely multiply and amplify false rumours and fake stories. The truth is often stranger than fiction, but sometimes fiction becomes more famous than truth.
These historical food obsessions remind us that even the most brilliant minds had their peculiar relationships with what they ate and drank. Whether it was Beethoven’s precise bean counting or Voltaire’s dangerous caffeine consumption, these habits shaped not just their daily routines but often their creative output and legacy. Makes you wonder what future historians will say about our own food quirks, doesn’t it?