A book by Alexander Lukashev · Second edition
The Hidden History of Beverages
From Sacred Plants to Corporate Caffeine and Back — 28 Caffeine-Free Herbal Drinks for Modern Life
The true stories behind coffee, tea, cacao and coca, from the goatherd first printed in Rome in 1671 to the coca leaf Coca-Cola still buys — plus 28 caffeine-free drinks for people cutting back on coffee, each checked against European herbal monographs, with who shouldn’t drink it, for how long and, where known, with which medicines.
E-book · 14 history chapters · 28 recipes · 167 footnotes · 145 sources
Part One · History
Why were some drinks blessed and taxed while others were banned?
From the water early hominids drank, through Aztec cacao and Sweden’s five coffee bans, to the Opium Wars and a J.P. Morgan banker at a Mazatec healing ceremony, the first half of this book follows the drinks people have reached for — and finds that among drinks of comparable strength, whether a drink was blessed or banned had more to do with trade than with what it gives the people who drink it.
It also takes apart the stories we were told.
The Ethiopian goatherd Kaldi and his dancing goats? The tale first appeared in print in Rome in 1671, and in the original the herder had no name and lived in Yemen.
Chapter 5 — free to read →Coca-Cola never stopped buying coca leaf: around a hundred metric tons a year still arrive at a plant in New Jersey.
Chapter 10 →Sweden banned coffee five times. The chapter sets the reasons given beside the ones in the ledgers.
Chapter 9 →A J.P. Morgan banker at a Mazatec healing ceremony — and what followed for the healer.
Chapter 12 →Part Two · 28 drinks
Looking for an alternative to coffee?
Maybe it’s your blood pressure. Maybe it’s acid reflux, or a stomach that no longer puts up with the morning cup. Maybe it’s the jitters, or sleep. Whatever the reason, there are two questions: what to drink instead, and who shouldn’t drink it.
This book answers both. Roasted chicory and dandelion root brewed like coffee, evening teas of lemon balm, chamomile and lavender, sea buckthorn, rosehip, hibiscus, ginger and ginseng. Every plant was checked against the herbal monographs of the European Medicines Agency — and where a plant has none, the chapter says so.
- Drunk whenever you like · 15
- For the cold season · 6
- Remedies, taken as a course · 7
Along the way you’ll find out
- why peppermint, the classic stomach soother, can make reflux worse;
- why licorice, an old cough remedy, can raise your blood pressure;
- why hibiscus, which can lower it, still calls for a word with your doctor if you take blood-pressure pills;
- what ginseng, the usual pick for “natural energy,” can actually be used for, according to the European monographs.
Sorted for you
- Fifteen are everyday drinks
- Six are for the cold season
- Seven are remedies, taken on a course and then stopped
Where a claim rests on tradition rather than clinical trials, the book says so.
Free to read
Read before you buy
These parts of the book are free — the same ones that are in the Apple Books sample.
Sources
Every claim has a footnote
Facts, figures and quotations carry footnotes — 167 of them — to a bibliography of 145 sources, from European Medicines Agency monographs and clinical trials to seventeenth-century treatises. Every page of this site links to them.
How this book was made
Written with AI, checked against sources
The first edition (2025) was written by the author together with the language model DeepSeek; some of the facts were checked at the time with Grok (xAI). The second edition was prepared with Claude (Anthropic): the model checked the text against sources, looked for errors, and proposed corrections and wording. What to accept was the author’s decision.
Questions
Before you buy
Is this book AI-generated?
Can I read part of it first?
Which drinks replace coffee?
Are the drinks safe in pregnancy?
Is this medical advice?
Where can I buy it?
The Hidden History of Beverages · second edition
Fourteen chapters of history. Twenty-eight drinks. Every claim sourced.
The e-book is on Apple Books, where the free sample has the same chapters as this site. If Apple Books doesn’t sell it where you live, “Other stores” shows the bookstores that do.