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Legend has it that the discovery of the effects of caffeine in coffee berries was first made by goats. As related in The Thousand and One Nights a Yemeni goat herder was dismayed by the non-stop energy  displayed by his goats, especially at night when they should have been sleeping. He and the wise men in his village discovered that the goats were eating vast quantities of berries growing wild in the hills. The wise men tried the berries and got a kick. Man’s enjoyment of and addiction to caffeine had begun.
But the true birthplace of the coffee berry was the area now known as Ethiopia. These berries, commonly referred to as cherries for their red color, contain two seeds, or beans. It is these beans, dried and roasted, that make our morning brew.
It was as medicine that coffee made its debut to the general public. One of the oldest known records of the use of coffee indicate that it was prescribed as a cure for intestinal difficulties as early as the tenth century by a Muslim doctor.
The idea of roasting the beans may have originated when a brush fire released the pleasant odor of roasted coffee. Theories and guesses and questions abound in the history of coffee. How did it get from Ethiopia to Yemen, for example? One idea is that Muslim holy men were among the first to use caffeine to keep awake for their night-time prayers. They took coffee with them to Mecca on the annual Haj and cultivation spread to southern Arabia. What is known is that coffee was established in both Persia and Arabia by the 15th century.
An oasis in Yemen on the Red Sea, called Mocha, became the world’s major provider of coffee. Coffee beans from Mocha’s high plain were shipped to the capitals of the Muslim world. The Arab rulers of Mocha insured that the cultivation of coffee would not spread by scalding all the green beans that were shipped from their port.
Word of the “wine of Arabia” spread to the west after the fall of Constantinople, and by the early 17th century Venice was importing coffee via Cairo. In 1616 a ship from the Dutch East India Company put in to Mocha and took on a load of green coffee. The captain also managed to smuggle a few cherries aboard and they were taken back to Amsterdam and planted in the Botanical Gardens.
About fifty years later a Frenchman trading with Mocha brought back a few sacks of coffee to Marseilles and shared it with friends. It was decades later when the first shipment hit France. The Pope was soon involved because Christians found the dark color of the drink so loved by Muslims as somewhat diabolical. The Pope tasted and gave his favorable opinion and authorization. Coffee was first sold by pharmacists in Marseilles and Lyon.
It wasn’t until 1669 that coffee made its appearance in court of Louis XIV with the arrival of the Turkish ambassador, Suleyman Aga. Parisians went gaga for the Aga and all things Turkish from clothing to manners. However, they found coffee a bit bitter and began to add sugar to the beverage. It caught on.
Tin the 1750s the Dutch sent some Arabica shoots from the plants grown in the Botanical Gardens in Amsterdam to their colonies of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and India and what is now Java. The British took Ceylon by 1802 and thus London was supplied with their favorite drink. In 1869 a rust plague wiped out the coffee plantations and the British replaced coffee with tea and the English were forced to change their drinking habits. (It seems that nowadays the pendulum is swinging back to coffee in the British Isles.)
Both the Dutch and the Sultan of Yemen gifted Louis XIV with coffee trees, which were planted in the King’s Garden in Paris. In the 1720s an infantry captain stationed in Martinique finagled two plants from the then king, which he transported back to the Caribbean not without difficulties. The young captain, one de Clieu, tended his plants through, storm, attack by pirates and a lack of water, arriving in Martinique with only one of the coffee plants. The cherries produced in its first yield were distributed on the island and also to Guadeloupe and Santo Domingo. Jamaica, Haiti, and the countries of Central America were soon to follow as producers of coffee.
The French stole cuttings from The Dutch in Guyana and were in turn robbed by the Portuguese for their colonies in Brazil. One story has it that a young officer was sent by the Portuguese to ask the governor of French Guyana for a few cuttings. He was instructed to steal them, if his petition was denied. The governor’s wife, who was a bit smitten by the dashing officer, is said to have pushed a few cherries into his hand as he was about to depart.
The worldwide demand for coffee soon gave rise to the slave trade. Slaves from Africa were shipped to Haiti by the French, to Surinam by the Dutch, and to Brazil by the Portuguese. There were a half million Africans working in Haiti by the time of the Insurrection in 1791, when the island was set ablaze. Until then half of the world’s coffee had been produced there.
By 1850 Brazil had become the leading coffee producer in the world with an annual output of 150,000 tons. Slavery continued in Brazil until 1889. Soon after that production exceeded demand and the country experienced its first glut.
Coffee is now grown in over sixty countries located in a band within 30º north and south of the equator--places like Gabon, Vietnam, Papua New Guinea, and Cuba. It is estimated that citizens of the world drink a billion and a half cups of coffee each day. - Researched and compiled by Ken Hebson of OWC.
Note: Much of the above was suggested by The Book of Coffee by Anne Vantal.
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