The Geography of coffee - Coffee Around the World - 1 (see page 2)
Coffee's Journey Around the World
(See also - Where does your coffee come from?)
Coffee was first discovered in Eastern Africa in an area we know today as Ethiopia. A popular legend refers to a goat herder by the name of Kaldi, who observed his goats acting unusually frisky after eating berries from a bush. Curious about this phenomenon, Kaldi tried eating the berries himself. He found that these berries gave him a renewed energy. The news of this energy laden fruit quickly spread throughout the region.
Hearing about this amazing fruit, Monks dried the berries so that they could be transported to distant monasteries. They reconstituted these berries in water, ate the fruit, and drank the liquid to provide stimulation for a more awakened time for prayer.
Coffee Leaves Africa
Coffee berries were transported from Ethiopia to the Arabian Peninsula, and were first cultivated in what today is the country of Yemen.
From there, coffee traveled to Turkey where coffee beans were roasted for the first time over open fires. The roasted beans were crushed, and then boiled in water, creating a crude version of the beverage we enjoy today.
Coffee Arrives in Europe
Coffee first arrived on the European continent by means of Venetian trade merchants. Once in Europe this new beverage fell under harsh criticism from the Catholic Church. Many felt the pope should ban coffee, calling it the drink of the devil. To their surprise, the pope, already a coffee drinker, blessed coffee declaring it a truly Christian beverage.
Coffee houses spread quickly across Europe becoming centers for intellectual exchange. Many great minds of Europe used this beverage, and forum, as a springboard to heightened thought and creativity.
Coffee Travels to America
In the 1700's, coffee found its way to the Americas by means of a French infantry captain who nurtured one small plant on its long journey across the Atlantic. This one plant, transplanted to the Caribbean Island of Martinique, became the predecessor of over 19 million trees on the island within 50 years. It was from this humble beginning that the coffee plant found its way to the rest of the tropical regions of South and Central America.
Coffee was declared the national drink of the then colonized United States by the Continental Congress, in protest of the excessive tax on tea levied by the British crown.
Coffee in the 21st Century
Today, coffee is a giant global industry employing more than 20 million people. This commodity ranks second only to petroleum in terms of dollars traded worldwide. With over 400 billion cups consumed every year, coffee is the world's most popular beverage. If you can imagine, in Brazil alone, over 5 million people are employed in the cultivation and harvesting of over 3 billion coffee plants.
Sales of premium specialty coffees in the United States have reached the multi billion-dollar level, and are increasing significantly on an annual basis
There is evidence, however, to suggest that coffee trees were cultivated in monastery gardens 1,000 years ago. According to folklore, a goat herder called Kaldi noticed that even the oldest goats behaved like young kids when they ate certain wild berries. Upon hearing this, the Abbot of the local monastery decided to experiment. He found that a brew of these ‘cherries’ could keep his brother monks awake through long hours of prayer.
A mocha in Mecca
Commercial cultivation followed, although the first reports of this, from the Yemen, were not recorded until the fifteenth century. By the sixteenth century, coffee was being grown in Persia, Egypt, Syria and Turkey. Its popularity was probably due, in part, to the fact that Muslims, forbidden alcohol by the Koran, found coffee to be an acceptable substitute.
The first coffee houses were opened in Mecca, where coffee drinking was initially encouraged, and quickly spread throughout the Arab world. These, which developed into luxuriously decorated places where music, dancing, chess and gossip could be enjoyed and business was also conducted. With thousands of pilgrims visiting the holy city of Mecca each year from all over the world, word of the ‘Wine of Araby’, as the drink was often called, began to spread far beyond Arabia.
East to West
Despite the fact that trade in coffee, a much-prized commodity, was jealously guarded by the Arabs to the extent that foreigners were not allowed to visit their coffee plantations or take fertile coffee beans out of the country, seed beans and plant cuttings were eventually taken out of Arabia and cultivated in the Dutch colonies in India and Java. The Dutch colonies became the main suppliers of coffee to Europe, with Amsterdam its trading centre.
From sinner to saint
Venetian traders first brought coffee to Europe in 1615. Opponents to coffee were openly cautious and called the beverage the ‘bitter invention of Satan’. The local clergy even condemned it! The controversy was so great that Pope Clement VIII was asked to intervene. Before making a decision however, he decided to taste the beverage for himself. He enjoyed the drink so much that he gave it Papal approval.
30 years later a coffee house or ‘café' was opened in Venice. The growth of popular coffee houses, which became favourite meeting places for both social and business purposes, spread from the mid-17th century to other European countries including Austria, France, Germany, Holland and England.
Café Culture
In Britain, the first coffee house was opened in Oxford in 1651 and by 1700 there were 3,000 coffee houses in London. Every man of the upper middle classes went to his coffee house daily to learn the latest news. Edward Lloyd's coffee house (founded in 1668), attracted seafarers and merchants and eventually became Lloyd’s of London, the world-famous insurers. Similarly, Jonathon’s Coffee House became the London Stock Exchange.
Coffee drinking spread to the colonies and was indeed taken to Virginia, USA but it would not have become so popular in America had it not been for the Boston Tea Party. Americans turned their back on Britain and tea and instead adopted coffee as their national beverage.
Coffee's Global appeal
The last three hundred years have seen coffee make its way around the world, establishing itself in the economies and lifestyles of the main trading nations. Coffee is now one of the most valuable primary commodities in the world, often second in value only to oil as a source of foreign exchange to developing countries. Millions of people around the world earn their living from the coffee industry.
At times in history coffee has been hailed as a medicinal cure-all, and at others condemned as the devil's brew - in the latter case usually for political or religious reasons, when coffee houses were at their height of popularity as meeting places. However, in the last half-century scientific research has established the facts about coffee, caffeine (responsible for coffee's mild stimulant effect) and our health: in moderation coffee consumption is in no way a health risk, and besides being a most pleasurable experience drinking coffee can indeed confer some health benefits. For more information on coffee and health click here.
History tells us other Africans of the same era fueled up on protein-rich coffee-and-animal-fat balls—primitive PowerBars—and unwound with wine made from coffee-berry pulp. Coffee later crossed the Red Sea to Arabia, where things really got cooking... Arabia made export beans infertile by parching or boiling, and it is said that no coffee seed sprouted outside Africa or Arabia until the 1600s—until Baba Budan. As tradition has it, this Indian pilgrim-cum-smuggler left Mecca with fertile seeds strapped to his belly. Baba’s beans bore fruit and initiated an agricultural expansion that would soon reach Europe’s colonies EUROPE CATCHES THE BUZZ
CROSSING THE ATLANTIC - (Circa 1720 to 1770)
On the return passage to Martinique, wrote de Clieu, a “basely jealous” passenger, “being unable to get this coffee plant away from me, tore off a branch.”
Then came the pirates who nearly captured the ship; then came a storm which nearly sank it. Finally, skies grew clear. Too clear. Water grew scarce and was rationed. De Clieu gave half of his allotment to his stricken seedling.
Under armed guard, the sprout grew strong in Martinique, yielding an extended family of approximately 18 million trees in 50 years or so. Its progeny would supply Latin America, where a dangerous liaison would help bring coffee to the masses...
COFFEE BLOOMS IN BRAZIL - (Circa 1727 to 1800)
1727: Brazil’s government wants a cut of the coffee market; but first, they need an agent to smuggle seeds from a coffee country. Enter Lt. Col. Francisco de Melo Palheta, the James Bond of Beans.
Colonel Palheta is dispatched to French Guiana, ostensibly to mediate a border dispute. Eschewing the fortresslike coffee farms, suave Palheta chooses a path of less resistance—the governor’s wife. The plan pays off. At a state farewell dinner she presents him a sly token of affection: a bouquet spiked with seedlings.
From these scant shoots sprout the world’s greatest coffee empire. By 1800 Brazil’s monster harvests would turn coffee from an elite indulgence to an everyday elixir, a drink for the people.
