COFFEE TAX AND COFFEE SNIFFERS @museum.de

From the middle of the 18th century, coffee was no longer the preserve of the nobility, but had percolated down to the bourgeoisie. Coffee consumption increased. But the Kingdom of Prussia needed money, so in 1766, Frederick the Second, dubbed the Great, issued a ban on private sector coffee imports, so people could only buy coffee from the state. In 1780, Prussia finally made coffee roasting a punishable offence, decreeing that: "It is prohibited for anyone and everyone to roast coffee in their houses or anywhere else, and to stock any other than the coffee supplied by the royal house."

The ban was monitored by coffee-sniffers, former soldiers who’d been invalided out and were unfit to serve. These coffee sniffers were permitted to enter people’s houses and apartments and search for roasted coffee.

After Frederick the Second died, the ban on coffee in Prussia came to an end. Instead, import duties were levied at the border.

A little over a century and a half later, in the summer of 1948, coffee tax became a nation-wide German consumption tax. Until 1953, the tax was 10 marks per kilogramme of roasted coffee. At the Belgian/Germany border, there were armed clashes between customs officers and smugglers, during which people were actually shot dead.

In the 1950s, the customs authorities in Hamburg still had a service dog trained to sniff out coffee.

These days, Germany’s national consumption tax on roasted coffee is 2 euros 19 cents per kilogramme – roughly two British pounds per 70 ounces. The coffee tax generates around one billion euros a year for the German government. In addition to the consumption tax, Germany levies value added tax of 7 percent on roasted coffee. It still falls to customs officials to monitor roasting plants and check the amount of roasted coffee produced.

Not many other countries tax coffee consumption. In Europe, apart from Germany, they are Belgium, Lithuania, Denmark, Norway, Switzerland and Greece.