Brewed Awakening

Published Feb 2, 2021, 10:00 AM

A pair of tales guaranteed to get a rise out of you. And the stories they tell are downright curious!

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Welcome to Aaron Benky's Cabinet of Curiosity is a production of I Heart Radio and Grim and Mild. Our world is full of the unexplainable, and if history is an open book, all of these amazing tales are right there on display, just waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities. Almost everyone has a morning routine. They wake up, take a shower, get dressed, and, perhaps the most important step of all, they make some coffee. Some may even forego the homemade stuff and instead opt for a professionally prepared brew at their local coffeehouse. From chain stores to mom and pop, there's something special about settling into a comfy chair and sipping a piping hot latte. Maybe it's the smell of the beans brewing, or the din of the surrounding conversations that makes these spaces so alluring. Not everyone finds them enjoyable, though, King Charles the Second was faced with a dilemma in six five. The English coffee houses were responsible for paying significant taxes, but they also became hotbeds of political activity. Dissidents had been known to meet inside them to conspire against the King. It wasn't uncommon for such establishments to face closure or increased taxes as a result. During the mid eighteenth century, Swedish King Adolph Frederick banned coffee outright. He claimed it made his subjects behave improperly. Unsurprisingly, that didn't stop the rich from drinking it and the poor from bootlegging it. When Gustav the Third ascended the throne years later, he too made sure coffee stayed out of the mouths of Swedish people. He believed it was so unhealthy that had actually killed those who consumed it, and to prove it, he came up with an experiment. He chose two men who had been sentenced to death for murder. One was told to drink three pots of coffee each day. The other was given three pots of tea to drink each day. Not exactly torture, but Gustav thought it would be. When he saw that the coffee drinker was still alive and well at the end of the experiment, he was furious, and the prisoner didn't just survive his harrowing ordeal. He outlived King Gustav, who was assassinated by masked men during a masquerade ball. A short while later in Germany, though coffee was not considered poison and coffee houses weren't known as dens of conspiracy. They were places to gather and enjoy each other's company. One particular house became the hottest spot in Leipzig, but it wasn't because of the coffee. It was called Cafe Zimmerman, owned and operated by man named Gottfried Zimmerman in the early seventeen hundreds, the cafe was a popular destination for middle class gentlemen interested in a fine cup of coffee and frequently live music. Women were not allowed to visit coffee houses at the time unless they were attending live concerts by local musicians. In fact, Cafe Zimmerman became a hotspot in what was essentially a college town, drawing university students who were part of the Collegium music Um. The collegium was founded in seventeen o two by George Philip Telemann, German composer who wrote over three thousand pieces of music over the course of his life. But after several years with his organization, he passed his duties onto another director, and each new director of the Collegium music Um held the title for a short time before handing it on to the next composer in line. The group was comprised mainly of university students who performed works by the current director and other famous composers of their time. They would meet at Cafe Zimmerman several times a week to play for the gathering crowds. The cafes owner even bought some of the larger instruments to have on hand, the kinds that musicians might only have used at school due to their size or cost, like harpsichords and double bays, and if you step back and think about it, Cafe Zimmerman was home to some of the first open mic nights, albeit without the mic. It gave student musicians, people who might not have been ready to play in grand theaters and opera houses, the chance to perform for live audiences. The activity became so popular that other collegiate music com were formed. They too began performing at Cafe Zimmerman for the evening crowds. The original collegium, however, the one started by Telemann, had a sure fire away to draw the biggest audiences to the shop. It was all thanks to its latest director, George Shot. One of shots friends was a composer in need of some help. He had written a series of cantatas with large orchestrations, but no way of performing them. Conveniently, Shot had a group of musicians at his disposal. He and his group put on several concerts at Cafe Zimmerman where they performed these new cantatas, and they were a hit. It was no surprise though, after all, his friend had composed the famous Brandenburg Concertos only a few years earlier, and in seventy nine, when Shot left the group to take on a new role elsewhere, that same friend stepped in as the new director. Perhaps he liked how they performed his pieces and his name, Johann Sebastian Bach. Prohibition was a bad time, at least for yeast. That's what got the J. Walter Thompson Company together in nineteen nine because they had been brought in to turn things around, and they weren't playing for small bills. Know their clients was the biggest in the yeast business. Whatever size other yeast merchants were in American cities and towns, they had barely risen past five percent of the bakers and home cooks who were ordering yeast in American catalogs and buying it off grocery store shelves by J. Walter Thompson's accounting their client and had more than nine of the yeast sales in America, and they got that way on purpose. As their business grew from the late eighteen hundreds to nineteen nineteen, their yeast salesman had proliferated across the country and undercut the sales from smaller operations. Now they controlled yeast, and in the early nineteen hundreds that also meant distilled liquor and beer. They were raking in money from all directions. But prohibition was set to hit the next year nine and the Yeast Kings knew it would reduce the very profitable liquor side of their business. Anyone in their business who wanted to fill in the gap in profit that would have been left there would have to figure out what else yeast could do besides fermenting alcohol. So that's what brought J. Walter Thompson to the table. You see, they were advertisers. When there was something to sell, they were the best in the business, and now they would be pitching yeast. Fortunately for the Yeast Kings, the ad men at J. Walter Thompson had some ideas. It started with some novel ways of thinking about food that had bubbled up since nineteen eleven. That's when a Polish biochemist named Casimir Funk coined a new term that we've all heard of, vitamin. For a while, there was some debate about what exactly it meant for there to be vitamins and food. They didn't seem to be something you could taste, and there wasn't any way to know if they were actually in there. But now nutrition scientists were saying that you couldn't just judge your food by how filling it was or how good it tasted. And a series of stories about vitamins was published in Good Housekeeping in nineteen fourteen, which convinced readers across America that they needed to find these mysterious things called vitamins, and they had to eat as many of them as they could, and that's something that an advertiser can work with now. The Yeast company sold their products in compressed cakes wrapped in tinfoil, so J. Walter Thompson launched a campaign to tell Americans that those little blocks of yeast were the keys to health, wealth, and success, and it wasn't like they had nothing to go on. A chemist named Atherton Sidell had actually published some research in nineteen sixteen showing that brewers yeast had enough nutrients in it to help people recover from some vitamin deficiencies behind conditions like scurvy. Soon enough, the Yeast for Health campaign had begun. Advertisements flew out to readers across the country. Yeast will cure your indigestion. Yeast will give you energy. But it didn't stop there. Soon enough, eating yeast cakes right from the foil was being declared a miraculous cure for that scourge of teenagers everywhere acne. Yeast was even proclaimed to be a cure for the common cold. After all, it was full of those new vitamins people kept hearing about. The Yeast company even paid for a professor at Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia to publish a study saying that yeast was proven to cure all these problems, and a special booklet called Yeast Therapy soon followed. And here's the thing, the ads worked. Care sales did fall during Prohibition that even in the years of the Great Depression, the sales of yeast cakes tripled. The Yeast for Health campaign pushed compressed cakes into the hands and mouths of kids and adults at unprecedented levels. But when this new burst of sales leveled off at the end of the nineteen twenties, J Walter Thompson shifted into a higher gear. The next round of advertisements featured pictures of stern European doctors with the miracle testimonies of how yeast had healed even more severe and mysterious conditions for their patients. By the final ad campaigns, they were declaring that yeast was even better for you than fruits and vegetables. It would cure and this is a quote, bad tongue, bad breath, bad skin because of all those vitamins. I'm sure the Yeast for Health made them rich and a campaign did them proud. The Federal Trade Commission less, so in nineteen thirty one they issued a cease and desist the ads, they said were misleading at best. Soon enough, the FTC was locked in a fight with the yeast Kings, a battle that lasted years as the government tried to scale back the level of falsehoods that were being printed in papers across the country. While the ad agencies then struggled mightily to keep sales rising with more and more outlandish claims. The Yeast for Health campaign came to an end in the nineteen thirties, and soon enough yeast cakes were out as well. But the yeast Kings landed on a new innovation, active dried yeast, and ironically, the enemy of our old campaigns became a major client because a Second World War in Europe was just beginning and armies needed food, so in the U s government was purchasing huge amounts of active dry yeast to ship with their military supplies. Not to mention the new revenue flow thanks to the end of prohibition, it kept the Yeast Kings alive. Eventually, the Fleischmann family sold the brand name to their innovative yeast products to other food conglomerates, and the liquor side of the business was spun off on its own in nineteen sixty two. But the sales kept rising, so much so that you can still buy yeast under the same brand name today. Fleischmann's Active Dry Yeast is on your grocery store shelf right now, just waiting for you to pick up and get cooking. Even if it actually won't cure what ails you. I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about the show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. The show was created by me Aaron Manky in partnership with how Stuff Works. I make another award winning show called Lore, which is a podcast, book series, and television show, and you can learn all about it over at the World of Lore dot com. And until next time, stay curious. Yeah,

Aaron Mahnke's Cabinet of Curiosities

From the creator of the hit podcast Lore comes a new, bite-sized storytelling experience. Each twice 
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