In Sweden, ölsupa, a thin gruel made with wine or beer (or in rare cases mead) as a base was a popular hot drink before the introduction of coffee and tea.

Ölsupa is made with wine or beer (rarely mead) as a base. If you were affluent, you would use Rhenian wine or German beer (which could be 4-6%), if you were less affluent, you used the local weak beer (1-2%). The beer or wine was mixed with milk and a small amount of flour and heated. Depending on how thick you wanted your ölsupa, what time of year it was and how affluent you were, you could mix in any combination of cinnamon, ginger, egg yolks, salt or sugar.

King Karl XII was very fond of ölsupa for breakfast, eating it while the rest of the "court" (as it was in the field) often ate meat.

Edit: Spelling.

Keep in mind, Coffee in particular may be slightly older than you might expect. Although it's not exactly relevant to the question, setting the dates helps establish the time period we're talking about.

Coffee (as in the plant), is native to west africa, and the first instances of making drinks from Coffee beans was in the 1500's in the Arabian peninsula. Possibly in the city of Mocha, Yemen.. There are actually several different origin stories for coffee.

In any case, by the late 1500's Coffee was widely spread throughout the middle east, and was arriving in southern europe, particularly Venice, which was a port for much of the european trade with africa and the middle east.

In 1600 Pope Clement VIII was asked by his advisors to ban coffee, because of claims it was a "bitter intervention of satan." He is purported to have stated: "This devil's drink is so delicious...we should cheat the devil by baptizing it."

Coffee also made its way into central europe through the Ottoman empire, and into England and the Netherlands through their trade with the far east. The first Coffeehouse opened in Vienna in 1673 and at that same time England had 3000 Coffee Houses. It remained an expensive drink for many years, but Coffee was definitely "widespread" in Europe by 1700 or so.

Tea has a similar and slightly newer history in Europe. Tea began to arrive in England in the mid 1600's.

So when you say "before the wide spread of cofee or tea" we're talking, effectively about pre-16th century europe.

To the extent you consider it "European Culture" to go as far back as Rome, there's this thread from 8 months ago asking whether the Ancient Romans had the equivalent of a cup of coffee.

The top answer recounts what some other people say in this thread. It was relatively common for people to drink diluted wine in moderate quantities throughout the day. Although alcohol is technically a depressant, consuming just a little bit tends to perk people up. This works more on a psychological level than a physical one. If you're just a little bit drunk aches and pains and being tired don't matter quite as much.

In non-roman cultures alcohol played a similar role, but I suppose you can also look at folk medicine a bit. Chervil AKA french parsley has a very mild stimulant effect, and was used in eastern european folk medicine for various remedies. See e.g. Chervil Tea.

I'm not an expert on herbalism, but many other herbs also have stimulant compounds that may, at times, have been used for various folk medicines. I don't know enough to say how widespread they are.

Salep was big in the 17th and 18th centuries across northern Europe. Still is in Turkey, the Balkans, and the middle east.

In Medieval Europe the upper classes would use a wide and heavy mix of spices in their food. Some of these such as a liberal use of pepper would have had a stimulating effect. For the very rich, their actual food couldn't be tasted at all under the spices, it was just a vehicle for the spice.

At some tables spice platters were a common feature, foregoing the actual food altogether, just passing a silver platter of various spices in divided compartments around the guests before and after a meal. Guests consumed spoonfuls of pepper, cinnamon, cloves, ginger, cardomon, nutmeg, sugar, salt, and others as we would a cup of espresso, or a glass of sherry. Spices were consumed liberally on food, on their own, or as solutions in wine or water. Medieval wine was often composed more of spices than of the juice of grapes.

Spice certainly stimulated the palate and so had an enjoyable effect on the person. Not only did it have a physical effect, it was also what the medieval mind imagined paradise to be like. All descriptions of paradise iwere largely based around liberal descriptions of the smell and taste of a wide variety of spices. So it would have had a transcendental effect on the mind in this sense also.

Source: Tastes of Paradise: a social history of spices, by Wolfgang Schivelbusch and David Jacobson

But saying this, medieval Europe was psychopharmacologically poor. Other cultures had coca, khat, opium etc., but the European commoner had nothing but alchohol, which they drank constantly as their sole liquid sustanence, water being full of disease.

But humans being what we are, no society would put up with such poverty of circumstances, people like to feel good. So in the absence of physical stimulants,the medieval European commoner would participate in cultural stimulants, which were often just as effective, producing very pronounced somatic effects. Group participation in religious sermons for instance produced a very striking group experience very similar to the effects of stimulating drugs. Some preachers were known for being able to make an entire crowd collapse in deep eruptions of weeping or powerful exhalations of ecstasy. These sermons were often preached outside though, without modern sound equipment, and the records show that the crowds numbered int their thousands. Most of the crowd therefore wouldn't have heard the preacher's words at all, but they experienced the stimulant effect nevertheless. There were also many solitary stimulant experiences as well as can be seen in the records of powerful ecstasies experienced by certain mystics like Julian of Norwich or Margery Kemp, such an experience being compeltely alien to us, since we are used to only experiencing such heightened sensations under the influence of pharmacological agents.

Read this fascinating article for further information.

Thanks all for the replies, I'm enjoying reading all of them, and as soon as I get home am gonna have fun following some of the things brought up.