Coffee in Sweden dates back to the 1670s, and was first a popular beverage amongst the elite. In the mid-1700s, it was banned from the country due in part to the high taxes, and it became a black-market type beverage. Why did King Gustav III want coffee out of his country for good? He worried that coffee caused health problems, and he became paranoid that meetups to drink coffee could result in power-hungry citizens trying to take over the country.
King Gustav III thought that the best way he could possibly get his fellow Swedes to stop drinking coffee was to prove its harm through a science experiment. A set of twins had been sentenced to death, but he offered their freedom in exchange for participation in an experiment. He had one twin drink three cups of tea each day for the remainder of his life, and the other twin drink three cups of coffee. In a twist of irony, King Gustav III was assassinated before he got to witness the results—which didn’t make a difference anyway, because the twin who drank coffee outlived the twin who drank tea. They both lived to be more than 83 years old, quite a feat for the time period. More than that, both twins outlived all of the doctors who were in charge of monitoring their health.
The coffee ban was removed once and for all in the 1820s. Today, coffee is an important part of Swedish culture. Swedes often take two breaks for coffee, which they call fika, each day, and Sweden is the country with the third-highest coffee consumption in the world.