History of coffee


Relief of a young, cherub-like boy passing a cup to a reclining man with a moustache and hat. The sculpture is white with gold accents on the cup, clothes, and items.
Over the door of a Leipzigcoffeeshop is a sculpturalrepresentation of a man in Turkish dress, receiving a cup of coffee from a boy

Legendary accounts[edit]

According to legend, ancestors of today's Oromo people were believed to have been the first to recognize the energizing effect of the coffee plant,[5] though no direct evidence has been found indicating where in Africa coffee grew or who among the native populations might have used it as a stimulant or even known about it, earlier than the 17th century.[5] The story of Kaldi, the 9th-century Ethiopian goatherder who discovered coffee when noticed how excited his goats became after eating the beans from a coffee plant, did not appear in writing until 1671 and is probably apocryphal.[5] The original domesticated coffee plant is said to have been from Harar[16] in Ethiopia.
Other accounts attribute the discovery of coffee to Sheik Omar. According to the ancient chronicle (preserved in the Abd-Al-Kadir manuscript), Omar, who was known for his ability to cure the sick through prayer, was once exiled from MochaYemen to a desert cave near Ousab. Starving, Omar chewed berries from nearby shrubbery, but found them to be bitter. He tried roasting the seeds to improve the flavor, but they became hard. He then tried boiling them to soften the seed, which resulted in a fragrant brown liquid. Upon drinking the liquid Omar was revitalized and sustained for days. As stories of this "miracle drug" reached Mocha, Omar was asked to return and was made a saint.[17]From Ethiopia, the coffee plant was introduced into the Arab World through Egypt and Yemen.[18]

Historical transmission[edit]

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 Muslim monasteries around Mocha in Yemen.[5] It was here in Arabia that coffee seeds were first roasted and brewed, in a similar way to how it is now prepared. By the 16th century, it had reached the rest of the Middle East, PersiaTurkey, and northern Africa. Coffee seeds were first exported from Ethiopia to Yemen. Yemeni traders took coffee back to their homeland and began to cultivate the seed. The first coffee smuggled out of the Middle East was by Sufi Baba Budan from Yemen to India in 1670. Before then, all exported coffee was boiled or otherwise sterilised. Portraits of Baba Budan depict him as having smuggled seven coffee seeds by strapping them to his chest. The first plants grown from these smuggled seeds were planted inMysore.[19] Coffee then spread to Italy, and to the rest of Europe, to Indonesia, and to the Americas.[20]
A Coffee can from the first half of the 20th century. From the Museo del Objeto del Objeto collection.
In 1583, Leonhard Rauwolf, a German physician, gave this description of coffee after returning from a ten-year trip to the Near East:
A beverage as black as ink, useful against numerous illnesses, particularly those of the stomach. Its consumers take it in the morning, quite frankly, in a porcelain cup that is passed around and from which each one drinks a cupful. It is composed of water and the fruit from a bush called bunnu.
—Léonard Rauwolf, Reise in die Morgenländer (in German)
From the Middle East, coffee spread to Italy. The thriving trade between Venice and North Africa, Egypt, and the Middle East brought many goods, including coffee, to the Venetian port. From Venice, it was introduced to the rest of Europe. Coffee became more widely accepted after it was deemed a Christian beverage by Pope Clement VIII in 1600, despite appeals to ban the "Muslim drink." The first European coffee house opened in Rome in 1645.[20]
A 1919 advertisement forWashington's Coffee. The first instant coffee was invented by inventorGeorge Washington in 1909.
The Dutch East India Company was the first to import coffee on a large scale.[21] The Dutch later grew the crop in Java and Ceylon.[22] The first exports of Indonesian coffee from Java to the Netherlands occurred in 1711.[23]
Through the efforts of the British East India Company, coffee became popular in England as well. Oxford's Queen's Lane Coffee House, established in 1654, is still in existence today. Coffee was introduced in France in 1657, and in Austria and Poland after the 1683 Battle of Vienna, when coffee was captured from supplies of the defeated Turks.[24]
When coffee reached North America during the Colonial period, it was initially not as successful as it had been in Europe as alcoholic beverages remained more popular. During the Revolutionary War, the demand for coffee increased so much that dealers had to hoard their scarce supplies and raise prices dramatically; this was also due to the reduced availability of tea from British merchants,[25] and a general resolution among many Americans to avoid drinking tea following the 1773 Boston Tea Party.[26]
After the War of 1812, during which Britain temporarily cut off access to tea imports, the Americans' taste for coffee grew. Coffee consumption declined in England, giving way to tea during the 18th century. The latter beverage was simpler to make, and had become cheaper with the British conquest of India and the tea industry there.[27] During the Age of Sailseamen aboard ships of the British Royal Navy made substitute coffee by dissolving burnt bread in hot water.[28]
The Frenchman Gabriel de Clieu took a coffee plant to the French territory of Martinique in the Caribbean, from which much of the world's cultivated arabica coffee is descended. Coffee thrived in the climate and was conveyed across the Americas.[29] The territory of Santo Domingo (now the Dominican Republic) saw coffee cultivated from 1734, and by 1788 it supplied half the world's coffee.[30] The conditions that the slaves worked in on coffee plantations were a factor in the soon to follow Haitian Revolution. The coffee industry never fully recovered there.[31] It made a brief come-back in 1949 when Haiti was the world's 3rd largest coffee exporter, but fell quickly into rapid decline.[32]
Meanwhile, coffee had been introduced to Brazil in 1727, although its cultivation did not gather momentum until independence in 1822.[33] After this time, massive tracts of rainforest were cleared first from the vicinity of Rio and later São Paulo for coffee plantations.[34] Cultivation was taken up by many countries in Central America in the latter half of the 19th century, and almost all involved the large-scale displacement and exploitation of the indigenous people. Harsh conditions led to many uprisings, coups and bloody suppression of peasants.[35] The notable exception was Costa Rica, where lack of ready labor prevented the formation of large farms. Smaller farms and more egalitarian conditions ameliorated unrest over the 19th and 20th centuries.[36]
Coffee has become a vital cash crop for many developing countries. Over one hundred million people in developing countries have become dependent on coffee as their primary source of income. It has become the primary export and backbone for African countries like Uganda, Burundi, Rwanda, and Ethiopia,[37] as well as many Central American countries

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