History of coffee

Coffee’s origins are not clear, but it is thought that drinking the beverage brewed from beans goes back to at least the 13th century. Ethiopians may have been the first to recognize the coffee bean plant’s energizing effects. Coffee is believed to have spread from Ethiopia to Egypt and Yemen. Earliest evidence of coffee’s existence appears in the middle of the 15th century, in the Sufi monasteries of Yemen. Coffee beans were first roasted and brewed in the Middle East. By the 16th century, coffee had spread throughout the Middle East, Persia, Turkey, and northern Africa, eventually reaching Italy, the rest of Europe, Indonesia and to the Americas.

Origins

Etymology

The English word "coffee" comes from the Dutch word, koffie. This word was in turn created from the Turkish kahve. The Turkish pronunciation was derived from the Arabic qahwa, truncated from qahhwat al-bun, or “wine of the bean.” Another possible origin of the word is from the Kingdom of Kaffa in Ethiopia, where the coffee plant originated. Its name there is bunn or bunna.

First Uses

One account of coffee’s origins involves a Yemenite Sufi mystic, Ghothul Akbar Nooruddin Abu al-Hasan al-Shadhili. According to legend, he observed birds of unusual vitality while traveling in Ethiopia, and felt the same energy when he ate the berries the birds had been eating. Another story, perhaps apocryphal, involves Kaldi, a goatherder, who saw how his flock became energized after nibbling on the red berries of a certain plant. He tried the berries and also became energized. When he brought the berries to a Muslim holy man in a nearby monastery, the holy man disapproved of their use and threw them into the fire. An enticing aroma arose. The roasted beans were removed from the embers, ground up and dissolved in hot water, becoming the world’s first cup of coffee. Studies of Coffea Arabica varieties, as well as Coffea Canephora and Coffea Liberica varieties have not shown where in Africa coffee first grew or who may have known about it earlier than the 15th Century.

Arab World and Spread to Europe

The earliest credible evidence of either coffee drinking or knowledge of the coffee tree appears in the middle of the 15th century, in the Sufi monasteries of the Yemen in southern Arabia. From there, coffee consumption spread to Egypt and North Africa. By the 16th century, it had reached the rest of the Middle East, Persia and Turkey. Coffee drinking spread to Italy, then to the rest of Europe. Coffee plants were taken by the Dutch to the East Indies and the Americas.

In 1587 the writer Abd al-Qadir al-Jaziri, compiled a work tracing the history of coffee. He reported that a Sheikh, Jamal-al-Din al-Dhabhani, mufti of Aden, was the first to use coffee, around 1454. Coffee ability to drive away sleep made it popular among Sufis. A translation traces the spread of coffee from present day Yemen, north to Mecca and Medina, and then to the larger cities of Cairo, Damascus, Baghdad, and Istanbul.
Coffee beans were first exported from Ethiopia to Yemen. Yemeni traders brought coffee back to their homeland and began to cultivate the bean. The first coffeehouse is believed to have opened in Istanbul in 1554. Earlier, in 1511, coffee was forbidden for its stimulating effect by conservative, orthodox imams at a theological court in Mecca. But the beverage was so popular that the bans were overturned in 1524 by an order of the Ottoman Turkish Sultan Selim I, with Grand Mufti Mehmet Ebussuud el-İmadi issuing a celebrated fatwa allowing the consumption of coffee. But in Cairo, a similar ban was instituted in 1532. Coffeehouses and warehouses there that contained coffee beans were sacked.
Coffee was also banned by the Ethiopian Orthodox Church some time before the 12th century. Ethiopian attitudes softened towards coffee drinking in the second half of the 19th century, and between 1880 and 1886, its consumption spread rapidly. According to the academic Richard Pankhurst, "this was largely due to [Emperor] Menilek, who himself drank it, and to Abuna Matewos who did much to dispel the belief of the clergy that it was a Muslim drink."

Europe

German physician botanist Leonhard Rauwolf was the first European to mention coffee when he noted that “chaube” was being consumed in Ottoman Alepps in 1573. Other European travelers corroborated Rauwolf’s observations.
The Ottoman Empire imported coffee to Italy. Venetian merchants introduced coffee-drinking to the wealthy and charged high prices for the drink. Pope Clement VIII, in 1600, decreed coffee was acceptable for Catholics to drink, despite appeals to ban it, and coffee’s popularity grew. Venice was the site of the first European coffee house, which opened in 1645.

England

Largely through the efforts of the British East India Company and the Dutch East India Company, coffee became available in England no later than the 16th century. The first coffeehouse in England was opened in by Pasqua Rosee, the servant of a trader in Turkish goods. Oxford's Queen's Lane Coffee House, established in 1654, still exists. By 1675, there were more than 3,000 coffeehouses throughout England. This popularity carried over to America.
The banning of women from coffeehouses was common, although in Germany women frequented them. In England they were banned.

France

Coffee was reportedly first brought to Paris by a Mr. Thevenot, who had travelled through the East. On his return to Paris in 1657, Thevenot gave some beans to his friends. But coffee consumption in France truly took hold in 1669, when Soleiman Agha, Ambassador from Sultan Mehmed IV, arrived in Paris with a large quantity of coffee beans. By May of 1670, the custom of drinking coffee among Parisians had become firmly established.

Austria

The first coffeehouse in Austria opened in Vienna in 1683 after the Battle of Vienna, by using the coffee bean supplies obtained after defeating the Turks. A Polish military officer of Ukrainian origin, Jerzy Franciszek Kulczycki, opened the coffee house began the popular custom of adding sugar and milk to coffee. Melange is the typical Viennese coffee. It comes mixed with hot foamed milk and a glass of water.

Netherlands

In the late 17th century, the Dutch managed to bring some live coffee plants from the Malabar area of India back to Holland, where they were grown in greenhouses. The Dutch also began growing coffee at their forts in Malabar. By 1699 they took plants to Batavia in Java, in what is now Indonesia.
Within a few years Dutch colonies in Java and Surinam had become the main suppliers of coffee to Europe.

Americas

Around 1720, Gabriel de Clieu brought coffee seedlings to Martinique in the Caribbean. Some 50 years later there were nearly 20,000 coffee trees in Martinique. Cultivation spread to Haiti, Mexico and to other Caribbean islands. The territory of San Domingo, now Haiti, supplied half the world’s coffee by 1788. French colonial plantation relied on African slave laborers. This was a major factor in the Haitian Revolution, from which the coffee industry there never fully recovered.
Around 1727, the Emperor of Brazil sent Francisco de Mello Palheta to French Guinea to obtain coffee seeds to become a part of the coffee market. Francisco managed to persuade the French Governor's wife to send him enough seeds and shoots to begin Brazil’s coffee industry. Coffee’s transcontinental journey was completed in 1893, when coffee from Brazil was introduced into Kenya and Tanzania, then Tanganyika, not far from its origins in Ethiopia 600 years prior.
After Brazil’s independence in 1822, coffee cultivation gathered momentum and huge tracts of rainforest were cleared around Rio de Janeiro and then Sao Paulo for coffee plantation.
In many countries, coffee cultivation involved large-scale displacement and exploitation of indigenous people. A notable exception was Costa Rica, where large farms did not develop because of a lack of labor. Better working conditions and smaller farms helped to quell unrest over the 19th and 20th centuries.

Production

Europeans' first foray into coffee production came when plants were obtained from the port of Mocha in Yemen and established in the Dutch East Indies. The plantings were so successful that soon the Dutch East India Company was supplying Europe with “java” coffee by 1719. Soon the Dutch had plantations in Ceylon and other Sunda islands. Coffee trees were also grown in greenhouses in the Netherlands.
French Captain Gabriel des Clieux introduced coffee to the Americas by obtaining d cuttings from a botanist. During a difficult voyage he shared precious water with the plants. Clieux established the plants in Guadeloupe, Saint-Domingue, and Martinique, where cacao plantations struck by blight were replaced with coffee plantations within three years.
The first coffee plantation in Brazil was established in 1727 when Lt. Col. Francisco de Melo Palheta smuggled seeds from French Guiana. By the 1800s, Brazil's harvests would turn coffee from an elite indulgence to a drink for the masses. Brazil relied heavily on slave labor from Africa on the plantations until slavery was abolished in 1888.
For much of the 19th and 20th centuries, Brazil has a virtual monopoly on the production of coffee. But the nation’s policy of keeping prices high spurred competition from other nations such as Colombia, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Indonesia and Vietnam. Large-scale production in Vietnam began following normalization of trade relations with the U.S. in 1995. Nearly all of the coffee grown there is Robusta.
Although coffee originated in Ethiopia, only a small amount for export was produced there until the 20th century, much of that being from around Harar in the northeast. The Kingdom of Kaffa, home of the plant, produced an estimated 110,000 and 130,000 pounds of coffee beans in the 1880s. Commercial production greatly increased in 1907 with the founding of the inland port of Gambela. More than 200,000 pounds of coffee was exported from Gambela in 1908. In 1927 and 1928 almost 9 million pounds passed through the port. Coffee plantations that were developed in Arsi Province took advantage of the Addis Ababa - Djibouti Railway to further increase exports.
Australia produces relatively little coffee, but there are several growers of the Coffea Arabica that use a mechanical harvesting system invented in 1981.

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