About 1,500 Years Ago (the birth of coffee)

About 1,500 years ago, in a region of Ethiopia called Kafa, coffee was first discovered by the Galla people. Legend has it that a goat herder called Kaldi noticed that his herd became extremely active whenever they grazed on a cluster of dark-leaved shrubs with red berries. When Kaldi tasted the berries himself, he realized what was responsible for the goat's unusual behaviour - the stimulant caffeine. Kaldi shared his discovery with the inhabitants of a nearby monastery, who developed a fondness for the coffee beans which they began to brew in boiling water. By drinking the beverage that resulted when the berries were boiled, the monks found they could stay awake during the long evening prayers. Shortly after this, the Galla people began consuming ground beans mixed with animal fat whenever they felt low on energy. Over the next few centuries, coffee consumption spread throughout Ethiopia but remained unheard of outside the Horn of Africa. Legends that attribute the discovery of coffee to Ethiopia are confirmed by botanical evidence, which indicates, beyond doubt, that Coffee Arabica originated on the high plateaus of central Ethiopia, several thousand feet above sea level, where it still grows wild today.

1,000 – 500 Years Ago (the coffee journey begins)

Five hundred years after it was discovered in Ethiopia, coffee started the journey that was to take it right around the globe and make it the world’s most popular drink. Legend tells of a Muslim Mystic called Omar who was exiled to the wilderness of Africa by his enemies in Arabia. He fought off starvation and controlled his hunger by doing what Ethiopians had already been doing for centuries; making a broth from coffee beans picked from the wild trees that dotted the hillsides. Eventually, Omar made contact with some enterprising traders, from what is now called Yemen, and told them about the amazing bean that had helped sustain him. 

It did not take long before coffee plants were taken across the Red Sea where they were sold to Muslim monks who began cultivating the shrubs in their gardens. At first, the Arabians made wine from the pulp of the fermented coffee berries but after a few years, coffee as we know it today, began to become the most popular beverage made from the beans. In the 10th century the noted Arabian physician Rhazes mentioned the physical effects of coffee in his medical journals. It was claimed that coffee could increase longevity, calm nerves and increase stamina.

Over the next several hundred years, coffee use gradually spread throughout the Arabic world and the first coffeehouses, known as “Kaveh Kanes” opened to meet the huge demand for the drink. The world's first coffee shop, Kiva Han, opened in 1475 in Constantinople. Coffee houses became centres of political and religious debate, so much so, that Sultan Amurat III had them closed and their proprietors tortured. The Vizier Mahomet Kolpili went further and had the coffee houses burnt to the ground and many of their customers sewn into leather sacks and thrown into the Bosphorus.

500 – 400 Years Ago (coffee shops begin to spread)

By the early 1500s coffee cultivation had become well established in the mountainous equatorial region that is modern day Yemen and southern Saudi Arabia.  It had become an economically important crop and the Arabians carefully protected their monopoly by forbidding uncooked berries from being taken out of the country. Their efforts, however, were thwarted by thousands of religious pilgrims who visited Mecca each year. Before long, coffee seeds found their way to Turkey, Egypt and Syria and Indonesia. Soon, Constantinople, Damascus and other near Eastern Cities all had Arabian influenced coffee houses - essentially places where patrons lingered over coffee, conversation, board games and cards. In Turkey, these coffeehouses were known as “schools of the wise”. These early coffeehouses also introduced coffee to European business travellers and traders who sought new crops to grow in the rapidly developing colonies that were beginning to generate vast amounts of wealth.  By the late 1500s, coffee was beginning to be consumed in Europe.

Venetian traders were the first to bring coffee to Europe just before the dawn of the 16th Century, and England's first coffeehouse was opened in Oxford in 1650. Two years later London saw its first coffeehouse. Hundreds soon followed, each attracting their own special customers. Jonathan's coffee house in Change Alley was the meeting place for stockbrokers, which eventually became the London Stock exchange. Lloyd's of London, the centre of the world's insurance businesses, also began life in 1688 as Edward Lloyd's Coffee House.  By the beginning of the eighteenth century there were more coffee shops in London than there are now. It was in these early coffeehouses that the concept of tipping began. A box labelled "To Insure Prompt Service" was displayed for patrons to drop coins into so that they would be served quickly. Tips is an anagram of this.

Pope Clement VIII initially urged his advisers to consider the favourite drink of the Ottoman Empire to be part of the infidel threat. After one sip, however, he decided to bless it instead, making it an acceptable Christian beverage. In 1683 Franz Kolshitsky, a former prisoner of the Turks, bought up all the coffee beans left behind at the siege of Vienna, when the Turks were beaten by the King of Poland. Kolshitsky opened up the first coffee house in Vienna and soon headed a chain of establishments throughout Central Europe. Word spread to Paris, where the Italian Francisco Procopio dei Celtelli opened the city's first salon - the Cafe Procope which is still in business today.

400 – 300 Years Ago (Europeans start cultivating coffee)

In about 1650 A.D. a Moslem pilgrim from India named Baba Budan sneaked some seeds out of Arabia. He planted his stolen treasure in the hills near Chikmagalgur in south India where they flourished. Today, offspring of Baba's original trees produce around a third of India's coffee. 

In 1616, the Dutch managed to obtain a coffee plant in Yemen, which they carefully transported to Ceylon (present day Sri Lanka) and used it to develop commercial coffee cultivation there.  They also obtained seeds from descendants of Baba Budan’s plants in India which they used to cultivate coffee in their East Indian colony of Java.  By the mid-1600s, Dutch coffee was being shipped back to Europe in commercial quantities.

The French were also interested in the Indian coffee, but their attempt to propagate it in southern France, near Dijon, failed because the tree does not tolerate frost. However, Louis XIV, who loved the taste of coffee, was determined to succeed at propagating the plant.

Coffee arrived in what is now the United States in 1607 and its popularity began to spread rapidly. However, it was not to overtake tea as the most popular drink until the end of the eighteenth century.

300 – 100 Years Ago (The incredible Noble Tree)

In 1714, the saga of the Noble Tree began when the Mayor of Amsterdam presented Louis XIV with a coffee plant. The plant had originally been obtained at the Arabian port of Mocha; then transported to Java.  From there, it was shipped back across the seas to Holland, and then it was brought overland to Paris. The French king entrusted the plant's care and cultivation to the royal court botanist, who constructed the first greenhouse in Europe to house it. It flowered, bore fruit, and became one of the most prolific parents in the history of plantdom.  Within a few short years, offshoots of the original Yemeni born coffee plant were on their way across the Atlantic. From that single tree sprung billions of Arabica trees, including most of those presently growing in Central and South America. 

Due to the efforts of Chevalier Gabriel Mathiew de Clieu, a French naval officer, the first sprouts from the noble tree reached Martinique in the Caribbean in about 1720.  He managed to obtain three seedlings from the Jardin de Plantes (the Royal Hothouse) and set off with them on a perilous transatlantic voyage in which he experienced violent storms, becalmed waters and attacks by pirates. Water had to be rationed on the voyage but de Clieu shared his allowance with the precious coffee seedlings. When these spindly shoots of the noble tree reached Martinique, they flourished. Fifty years later there were 18,680 coffee trees in Martinique, and coffee cultivation was established in Haiti, Mexico, and most of the islands of the Caribbean using cuttings from Martinique.

Shoots from the noble tree were also sent to the island of Reunion, in the Indian Ocean, then called the Isle of Bourbon. The plants that developed there had smaller beans, and were named var. Bourbon. The famed Santos coffees of Brazil and the Oaxaca coffees of Mexico are said to be offspring of the Bourbon tree.

With the expansion of European trading empires coffee was taken back to the tropical regions of Africa and on to the Caribbean, Latin America and South Asia to be grown on estates. In Brazil the development of improved transport systems, particularly railways, in and around Rio State and the importation of slave labour led to the growth of an industry that soon dominated world markets.

Like the Arabians before them, the Dutch and the French carefully guarded their coffee seedlings. The Dutch had successfully brought coffee from Java to Dutch owned Guiana (Surinam) in South America while the French cultivated their crops in neighbouring French Guiana. When a border dispute arose, Francisco de Melo Palheta, a Portuguese Brazilian official was asked to arbitrate. Palheta, an army officer with a reputation as a ladies man, saw a multifaceted opportunity; to romance the wife of French Guiana's governor, reach a settlement between the French and the Dutch, and along the way obtain coffee seeds or seedlings. Legend has it that his reward for a settlement was a farewell bouquet from the governor’s wife in which were hidden several coffee tree seedlings. Once planted in Palheta's estate in Brazil, these seedlings thrived and flourished in the tropical climate and rich soils. By the end of the 18th Century, coffee had become a highly profitable export crop for the Portuguese colony. Today Brazil is this planet's largest producer and exporter of coffee, supplying one third of the world; more than any other coffee producing country.

Around this time, demand for coffee was growing sharply in the USA. The Boston Tea Party in 1773, where British tea was thrown into the sea, made drinking coffee rather than tea a patriotic duty. The industrial technologies of the late-nineteenth century transformed coffee beans - previously sold green and then cooked on the home stove - into factory-roasted and pre-packaged commodities for a mass market. The popular coffee blend Maxwell House was named after the hotel in Nashville, Tennessee, where it was first served in 1886. In 1822, a Frenchman, Louis Bernard Rabaut, invented the espresso machine.

About 100 Years Ago (Coffee completes its round-the-world journey)

For the final irony in coffee’s long journey, we have to wait until 1893, when coffee seed from Brazil was introduced into Kenya and what is now Tanzania, only a few hundred miles south of its original home in Ethiopia, thus completing a six-century long circumnavigation of the globe.

Modern Times

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Hills Bros in the US began packing roast coffee in vacuum tins, spelling the end of the ubiquitous local roasting shops and coffee mills. In 1901 the first soluble 'instant' coffee was invented by a Japanese-American chemist, Satori Kato of Chicago. Decaffeinated coffee was introduced to the US in 1923 by the German importer Ludwig Roselius. In 1938 the Nestle company introduced spray-dried coffee in Switzerland. Coffee sales boomed during Prohibition. During the Second World War American soldiers were issued instant Maxwell House coffee in their ration kits.

In post-war Europe and the US, coffee consumption grew far beyond its pre-war levels. Manufactured by multinational companies like General Foods, Nestlé or Allied Lyons, and backed by expensive advertising campaigns, instant coffee soon came to occupy a large sector of the British and US markets. Advertisements promised to transform women's lives and increase their leisure time by simplifying the coffee-making process.

Until the end of the Second World War Brazil supplied almost three-quarters of the world coffee market. In the 1930s, in co-operation with Colombia and other Latin American countries, Brazil attempted to force the coffee-importing countries to raise the price of coffee. However, Britain and Holland had large-scale coffee plantations in East Africa and Indonesia respectively and this early attempt to form a producer cartel failed.

Profits from the coffee trade began to concentrate in the shipping, processing and retailing sector. The most labour-intensive, risky and unprofitable part of the operation - growing and processing the bean itself - was left to small-scale producers. The strongly-flavoured Robusta coffee grown in Africa proved particularly suited to instant coffees. Within a relatively short period of time 17 sub-Saharan countries had become heavily dependent for their economic survival upon exports of coffee.

Discerning drinkers, however, remained resistant to instant coffee and opted for the real thing. Italians favoured cappuccino and espresso. Turks and Arabs continued drinking tiny cups of very strong coffee flavoured with cardamom.

Meanwhile coffee-making paraphernalia proliferated in domestic kitchens. More recently, gourmet and organic blends have begun to make a come-back, heralding the return of the coffee-shop. In the last 15 years the number of coffee bars in the US has leapt from 250 to over 10,000. Some sought-after beans, like Jamaican Blue Mountain and Ethiopian Yirgacheffe, sell for three or four times the usual price.

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