History Of Coffee

Coffee history probably originated in the province of Kaffe, Ethiopia, but it is a hotly contended issue.  It seems that the African tribes knew of coffee since antiquity, grinding their grain and developed a paste used to feed animals and increasing the ’power’ of their warriors. The archaeological data available today suggests that coffee was not "domesticated" before the fifteenth century. In 1583, Leonard Rauwolf, a German doctor was the first westerner describe the beverage. According to coffee history timelines, the first coffee shop, Kiva Han, opened in 1475 in Constantinople.

Coffee reached Europe around the year 1600, thanks to the Venetian merchants, the drink was well received by monks because it helped them to keep awake and keep the ‘spirit clean’. In 1650, a Muslim pilgrim, Baba Budan travelled to India, and planted coffee in Mysore those plants descendants still exist today. Coffee was particularly popular with German Protestants, but they did not drink it, they took it as snuff. By 1611 some wealthy Germans launched campaign to ban its use, which lasted 100 years until Frederick II of Prussia decriminalized its use, but subjecting it to a heavy tax. In southern and western Europe there was greater tolerance. In the decade from 1650 it began to be very imported and consumed in England, and cafes opened in Oxford and London, the first in 1652.

The cafes had become places where “dangerous’ liberal ideas were born, because of frequent visits to these places by philosophers and lawyers. In 1676, this agitation prompted the prosecutor of King Charles II of England to demand the closure of cafeterias. But its popularity won the day and there were more than two thousand cafes in London by 1700. The famous Lloyd's insurance company was originally a cafeteria, founded in 1688. During the course of coffee history, coffee was banned in Russia, with punishments including torture and mutilation. And when the Tsarist police found someone having a mental breakdown they attributed it to coffee.

Coffee crossed the Atlantic in 1689, with the opening of the first establishment in Boston. The drink gained huge popularity and earned the rank of national drink, so much so that tea fell out of favour and rebels threw the tea into the sea as an insult to the British, directly resulting in the War of Independence.

Coffee reached its full social acceptability in the eighteenth century. Soon the major crops went to Ceylon and Indonesia; subsequently they were consolidated as the major crop in South America.

Coffee began to be grown in the English colonies, particularly in Ceylon, but the plantations were devastated by a plant disease and eventually replaced by tea plantations. In 1696, the Dutch planted coffee in Indonesia and Java. In 1714, the infantry captain Gabriel Mathieu de Clieu hid a cutting from a coffee plant offered by Holland to King Louis XIV of France and kept in greenhouses set on the slopes of Mount Pelee in Martinique and in Santo Domingo. Fifty years later, there were 19 million coffee plants in Martinique. In 1813 Cúcuta Ordóñez Ignacio Lara was the first to have a crop of coffee in Colombia.

The main modern coffee producing regions are South America (notably Brazil and Colombia), Vietnam, Kenya and Ivory Coast. Hawaii has a small coffee production of high quality and high price, but among the many varieties developed and more expensive coffee remains the famous Blue Mountain from Jamaica. For several decades in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries Brazil was the largest producer and virtual monopoly on trade coffee, until a policy of maintaining high prices generated business opportunities to other producers, such as Colombia, Guatemala and Indonesia