Q&A
What was Gustav III’s coffee experiment?
• SHORT ANSWER
The Swedish king wanted to prove that the brew was life-threatening. He was wrong
• LONG ANSWER
The King of Sweden Gustav III (reigned 1771-92) had a mission to prove that drinking coffee, an increasingly popular beverage among his people, could seriously damage one’s health. His reason: he disliked it, but not as much as hating how coffee houses were places of dangerous political talk. So, the king decided to concoct a fiendish experiment.
He found a pair of identical twins both in prison for murder – aconvenience that has raised eyebrows among some historians – and offered to spare their lives if they let him ply one with three pots of coffee a day and the other with tea. Gustav would then wait to see who died first.
He never found out the results since the twins were alive and well at the time of his assassination in 1792, and still enjoying their daily brews. In the end, the coffee drinker outlived his tea-sipping brother, as well as the medical professionals supervising the experiment.