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HISTORY
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A Brief History of Coffee
Cultivated across the equatorial regions of the world, roasted, ground and served across the seven continents, coffee today is a mainstay of our lifestyles.
By Will Street
Jul. 25, 2019, 11:30 AM
Early History
Historians and researchers are uncertain as to the exact origins of coffee, however it is believed that the first origins of the coffee tree were in the Harenna Forest, found in the Bale mountains, a hundred kilometres or so southeast of Addis Ababa, in Ethiopia. It is thought to have originated there owing to the increased altitude of the mountains, which brings in increased rainfall from the Indian Ocean, thereby compensating for the semi-arid geography of the region.
Concerning who were the first humans to taste the coffee tree, there are several legendary accounts of the origins of coffee. One account concerns a traveller in Ethiopia. When reaching the point of starving, he chewed berries from the nearby shrubbery, but found them to be too bitter. He tried roasting the berries in an attempt to improve their flavour, but still found they became too hard. He then tried boiling the berries whereupon a fragrant brown liquid was produced. Upon drinking the liquid,the traveller was revitalized and sustained for days. As stories of his new discovery reached Mocha, he was asked to return and made a saint.
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​Another myth concerning the origins of coffee involves the 9th Century Ethiopian goat-herder, Kaldi, who noticed the energising effects of the substance when his flock chewed on the bright red berries of a certain bush. Kaldi ate the berries himself, which gave him such an exhilaration that he brought the berries to a monk in a nearby monastery. The monk disapproved and threw the berries into a fire, however the smoke from the burning berries was so fragrant that it attracted other monks to come and investigate. The roasted beans were raked from the embers, ground up, and dissolved in hot water, yielding supposedly the world's first cup of coffee. However, the story is not known to have appeared in writing before 1671, 800 years after it was supposed to have to have happened, and therefore is generally considered apocryphal.
An Ethiopian Goat-herder. Credit: "_Y1A0005" by Ninara is licensed under CC BY 2.0
Aside from myth, it was the Ethiopian ancestors of today's Oromo ethnic group who are known to have been the first to have recognised the energising effect of the native coffee plant. Oromo tribesmen would embark on days- long hunting trips and benefited from thecoffee plant's ability to quell hunger and provide more energy. Studies have been conducted into the nature of the Oromo's tribe's coffee plants, in particular studies on genetic diversity have been performed on Coffea Arabica varieties, in an attempt to look into their genetic history, however no direct evidence has ever been found indicating where in Africa coffee grew or who amongst the natives would have used it as a stimulant prior to the 17th Century. In terms of the Oromo population it is said that the domesticated plant first originated in the city of Harar and that there were also distinct populations of the Oromo tribe in nearby Kenya and Sudan, alongside Ethiopia.
Middle Ages
The earliest concrete evidence of either coffee drinking or knowledge of the coffee tree appears in the middle of the 15th Century in Yemen's Sufi's Monasteries. These were organisations that practised a form of "Islamic Mysticism" and conducted many spiritual meetings involving rituals and other religious practices in an attempt to strive towards Ishan (perfection of worship). Coffee beans were first exported from Ethiopia to Yemen, where they were cultivated and used in the monasteries. The Arabic word, qahwa, originally meant wine, and reflects the substitute the coffee plant represented to outlawed alcohol. Sufis in Yemen used coffee as a kind spiritual intoxication whilst in worship and as an aid to concentration throughout the night. Much of the information regarding coffee in the 15th Century comes from the writer Abd al-Qadir al-Jaziri, who in 1587 compiled a work tracing the history and legal controversies surrounding coffee. According to him, it was the Yemeni mufti of Aden, Jamal-al-Din al-Dhabhani, who was the first to adopt the drink in the middle of the 15th Century.
From Yemen, Islamic sources from the 15th Century chart that coffee spread northwards to Mecca and Medina, and then to the larger cities of Cairo,Damascus, Baghdad and Constantinople. By 1414, the beverage was known in Mecca and in the early 1500s was spreading to the Mameluke Sultanate of Eygpt and North Africa from the Yemeni port of Mocha. Coffee houses developed in Cairo through the 15th Century along with the city of Aleppo in Syria and Istanbul, the capital of the Ottoman Empire. The spread of coffee throughout the Islamic world was not, however, met without bans along the way, for example in Mecca in 1511 it was banned by one theological court for its stimulating effect while a ban was instituted in Cairo in 1532.
As the years rolled by, the ban in Istanbul was overturned by the Ottoman Turkish Sultan, Suleiman I, and coffee continued to spread throughout the Middle East. By the end of 16th Century, it had spread across the whole of the Middle East, the Safavid Empire and the Ottoman Empire.
A mural in Topkapi palace, made during the Ottoman Empire in Turkey. Credit: "Topkapi Palace Istanbul" by KLMircea is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0
Spread into Europe
It is said that it was Turkish slaves in Malta, captured by European crusaders, who first introduced coffee to Europe in the 15th Century. Domenico Magri in his 1671 study, Virtu del Kafé, wrote that Turks were "most skilful makers of this concoction" while fellow 17th Century German traveller, Gustav Sommerfeldt, heralded the ability and industriousness with which Turkish prisoners earned money "by preparing coffee, a powder resembling snuff tobacco, with water and sugar."
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Escaping the torments of slavery and at a higher- minded level, coffee did mostly spread into Europe through the prospering trade between the Republic of Venice and the Middle East in the 16th Century. Trade across the Mediterranean brought a large variety of African goods, including coffee, to the front-running European port. Venetian merchants targeted coffee at the wealthy, exploiting the exoticism and uniqueness of the newfound delicacy. Trade between the Middle East and Europe likewise spread coffee further westwards across Europe. According to the German physician, Leonhard Rauwolf's 1583 account, coffee became available in England no later than the 16th Century.
A 1652 handbill advertising coffee for sale in St. Michael's Alley, London, Credit: Pasqua Rosée [Public domain]
Over 300 coffee houses were established in London by the mid 17th Century. The British East India Company and the Dutch East India Company both amplified the import of coffee into Europe and, in part spurred on by the belief that coffee had medicinal properties, coffee was consumed in the masses during the 17th Century. Oxford's Queen's Lane Coffee House, still in existence today, was established in 1654.
In Germany, coffee houses were first established in North Sea ports during the 17th Century, including Bremen in 1673 and Hamburg in 1677. Like in Italy, it was initially taken up by the ruling classes, for example at the court of the Great Elector, Frederick William of Brandenburg, where it was served as early as 1675. Berlin's own first coffee house opened in 1721.
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It was the Dutch who were the first Europeans to obtain live coffee plants or beans, doing so in 1616. Pieter Van den Broecke, a Dutch merchant, obtained some of the closely guarded coffee bushes from Mocha, Yemen, in 1616. He took them back to Amsterdam and cultivated them in the city's botanical gardens. Forty years later the beans had adjusted well to the conditions in Amsterdam's botanical gardens and produced numerous healthy Coffea Arabica plantations. In 1658, the Dutch used these coffee beans for coffee cultivation in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and later southern India, however due to failings abandoned the plantations to focus on their Javanese plantations where at last they had greater success. Before long, the Dutch colonies of Java in Asia and Suriname in the Americas were the main suppliers of coffee to Europe.
Rest of the World
Coffee had been introduced to New Amsterdam, later called New York by the British, in the mid 17th Century. Although coffee houses had rapidly began to appear, tea remained the favoured drink in the American colonies until 1773, when colonists revolted against a heavy tax on tea imposed by King George III. The revolt, known as the Boston Tea Party, would dramatically shift the United States' drinking preference away from tea in favour of coffee over the future centuries.
Dutch production of coffee continued to thrive during the late 17th century. Their plantations in Batavia, on the island of Java, were central to flourishing Dutch provision of coffee to Europe. In 1714, the Mayor of Amsterdam presented a gift of a young coffee plant to King Louis XIV of France. The king ordered the plant to be grown in the Royal Botanical garden in Paris. In 1723, a young naval officer, Gabriel de Clieu obtained a seedling from this plant and travelled away with it to Martinique. There, the seedling was planted and not only thrived but was so successful that it is credited with leading to the plantation of 18 million coffee trees on the island over the following 50 years.
The seedling would bring the plantation of coffee trees even further afield to regions as far as the Caribbean, Central and South America. Brazilian coffee, the biggest exporter of coffee today, owes its existence to Francisco de Mello Palheta, who was sent by the emperor to French Guiana to get coffee seedlings. The story goes that the French were not willing to share, however the French Governor's wife, captivated by the Brazilian's good looks, gave him a large bouquet of flowers before he left. Buried inside the flowers were enough coffee seeds to start what would become a flourishing Brazilian industry worth billions of dollars today.
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The Dutch expanded their cultivation of coffee trees to the islands of Sumatra and Celebes and missionaries, traders and travellers from different parts of the world continued to spread the coffee bean to new lands.
A Coffee Planation, 1881 Credit https://archive.org/stream/cu31924000870968/#page/n33/mode/1up [Public domain]
The Modern World
Today, coffee is the second most sought commodity in the world, after crude oil. The Observatory of Economic Complexity (OEC) estimated in 2015 that coffee is worth 30 billion dollars in exports every year. With such a demand, coffee consumption has gone through first, second and third waves, with even a fourth on the horizon.
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In 1884, the espresso machine was invented by Angelo Moriondo of Turin, in Italy, and began to appear in the production of the coffee drink in the early 1900s. Prompted by a developing feeling of absence of quality and experience, a second wave coffee production and consumption appeared in the late 20th Century. It is generally considered as initiated when Erna Knutsen used the phrase "speciality coffee" in the Tea & Coffee Trade Journal in 1971. The Speciality Coffee Association of America was later founded in 1982.
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Today's largest coffee chain, Starbuck's coffee, was founded in 1971, and during the 1950s the Colombia coffee association, FNC/Café de Colombia, created the fictional character, Juan Valdez, for their marketing campaigns whose role it was to remind drinkers that not every coffee cup tastes the same. The forces at play helped to create a second wave of coffee drinking that still dominates commercial coffee consumption, at least in western Europe, in our current times.
A Barista working on an espresso machine in Costa Coffee.
Particularly in recent years, a third wave of coffee consumption has emerged. Declared as begun by coffee writer, Trish Rothgeb, in 2002, third wave coffee seeks to find new ways and methods to manipulate the taste of coffee, while also focusing on the story behind each cup. Today there are even competitions for each cup of coffee, including the World Barista Championship, which takes place every year. The future of coffee can only be exploring new methods to create each cup of coffee, with a fourth wave expected to explore new and different technologies. I'm sure we all have wondered how each cup we stare down into originated and what processes its been through. As an invaluable tasty and energising drink we all should cherish today, join us at blawa.com in picking up a cup.