Beethoven: I Counted 60 Coffee Beans for Every Cup

Beethoven's strangest breakfast rule comes from Anton Schindler, his late-life assistant and first major biographer. Schindler wrote that Beethoven allowed exactly sixty coffee beans per cup and counted them by hand so a scoop could not be off by even one or two beans. 1

Other visitors independently described Beethoven making black coffee in a glass vessel near his writing desk. The sixty-bean number, however, rests on Schindler alone, so it is best understood as a vivid historical account rather than a fact confirmed by several witnesses. 2