December 1792: Right after arriving in Vienna, Beethoven prepared a shopping list. Items and costs on the list are “wig-maker, coffee, overcoat, boots, shoes, pianoforte-desk, seal, writing-desk, pianoforte-money.”
In Beethoven’s time Vienna still had a rigid class-based society each having its own brothels, restaurants and coffee houses (cafés), but Beethoven, as a commoner and darling of aristocrats, had access to all kinds. Housing was not the brightest feature of contemporary Vienna thus locals spent leisure time in coffee houses. Coffee appears again a bit later in Beethoven's diary as soon as he started his lessons with Haydn: "22x, chocolate for Haidn and me . . . Coffee, 6x for Haidn and me."
A plaque on a building at Himmelpfortgasse 6 that now houses Café Frauenhuber explains that Ludwig van Beethoven premiered a quintet for pianoforte and brass here in 1797. The Frauenhuber coffee house actually opened for business while he still lived.
Nannette Streicher was the wife of Beethoven's piano builder Johann Andreas Streicher, a piano builder in her own right and a surrogate mother to Beethoven. Beethoven wrote in an angry letter to Nanette Streicher, that his nephew Karl’s mother (from 1815 Beethoven’s had legal custody over his late brother's son) bribed the servants with sugar, coffee and cash, in order to have access to Karl (something the composer had forbidden).
At the end of his life, because of his serious illness, Dr. Braunhofer ordered him a special diet. He was ordered to drink warm milk two or three times a day and avoid wine and coffee that "augments and exaggerates the activity of the nerves".