The Origins of Fig Coffee: From Vienna's Coffeehouses to a World at War

Every so often someone asks us, kindly, whether we invented fig coffee. We didn't, and we'd rather tell you the real story — because the real story is better. Fig coffee is older than our company, older than our grandparents, and it earned its place in the cup the hard way: through empire, scarcity, and two world wars.

It starts before figs: Europe learns to roast everything

Almost as soon as coffee conquered Europe in the 1600s, people who couldn't afford it started roasting whatever they could to imitate it — wheat, rye, chestnuts, oats, chickpeas. By 1733 a German encyclopedia was already writing up roasted-oat coffee, and by 1769 the first factory-made chicory 'coffee' hit the German market. Frederick the Great, annoyed at the money leaving Prussia for imported beans, promoted the local stuff as practically a patriotic duty.

Vienna gives figs the starring role

The fig's chapter opens in the Austro-Hungarian world of the 19th century. Vienna took coffee more seriously than anywhere on earth, and somewhere along the way its roasters discovered what we rediscover every day: a dark-roasted fig doesn't just imitate coffee — it improves it. Roasted fig brought body, color, and a natural caramel sweetness that softened harsh, expensive beans. Feigenkaffee — literally 'fig coffee' — became a fixture, sold both as a blend-in and on its own.

It wasn't a fringe product. Austrian firms like Titze built themselves on it — their 'Kaiser-Feigenkaffee,' the emperor's fig coffee, was advertised as 'the best, most flavorful, most productive coffee additive' and stayed a household name for generations. Across the empire in Zagreb, the Franck company (founded 1892) roasted fig and chicory blends that Croatians still drink today. In that corner of Europe, a little roasted fig in the cup wasn't a compromise. It was how coffee was supposed to taste.

Then the wars came

The First World War cut Central Europe off from coffee almost entirely, and the substitutes stopped being a flavor choice and became the whole cup. What Austria had done for taste, a continent now did for survival — figs, chicory, barley, acorns, whatever could be roasted dark and brewed hot. The Second World War repeated the lesson on a bigger scale. Even America, land of the bottomless cup, rationed coffee starting in November 1942, and households on both sides of the Atlantic learned the word 'ersatz.'

Here's the detail that matters: when the wars ended and the beans came back, most of the substitutes vanished overnight. Nobody missed acorn coffee. But fig coffee didn't disappear. In Austria and the Balkans it stayed on shelves and in recipes — because it had never really been a substitute there. It was a flavor people loved before the shortages and kept loving after.

The idea crosses the ocean

That's the tradition Coffig comes from — chosen, not rationed. Since 2008 we've made one thing: 100% organic Black Mission figs, grown in California's San Joaquin Valley, roasted dark and ground to brew exactly like coffee. No blend, no bean, no caffeine. Where the old Viennese roasters used fig to improve coffee, we finally gave it the whole cup.

So no — we didn't invent fig coffee. Vienna's coffeehouses did, more than a century ago, and two world wars taught half the world to drink it. We just think the fig never needed the war, or the bean. It was the best part all along.