Coffee History
Coffee began as a wild shrub in the forests of Ethiopia, became a drink in Yemen, spread through the Ottoman world, and was carried around the planet by European empires that grew it with enslaved labour. Almost every way we drink it today was invented in the last hundred and twenty years.
The history of coffee is a history of trade, religion, empire and invention, and it is worth knowing in outline because it explains so much about the drink: why some countries grow it and others drink it, why a cup in Istanbul looks nothing like a cup in Melbourne, and why so many coffee words come from Arabic.
This is the short version. The sources at the end are where to go for the long one.
The timeline
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Before the 1400s: the Ethiopian forest
Coffea arabica grows wild in the highland forests of south western Ethiopia, where it originated. People there almost certainly used the plant long before coffee was drunk anywhere else, chewing the cherries or the leaves. The story of the goatherd Kaldi and his dancing goats is a legend, written down centuries later.
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The 1400s: Yemen and the Sufis
The first reliable accounts of coffee as a brewed drink come from Yemen in the fifteenth century. Sufi communities drank it to stay awake through night devotions. Yemen began cultivating coffee as a crop, and the port of al-Makha, Mocha, became the centre of the trade for two centuries.
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1500s: Mecca, Cairo and Istanbul
Coffee spread through the Arabian peninsula and Egypt. Coffeehouses appeared, and so did the authorities who distrusted them: in 1511 the governor of Mecca briefly banned coffee. The ban did not last. Coffeehouses opened in Istanbul in the 1550s and became centres of conversation, games, music and politics. The way of brewing that came out of this world survives as Turkish coffee.
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1600s: Europe's coffeehouses
Venetian traders brought coffee to Europe early in the century. England's first coffeehouses opened in Oxford around 1650 and in London soon after. Coffeehouses were nicknamed penny universities, because for the price of a coffee you could join any conversation. Business grew out of them: Lloyd's of London began in Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse in the 1680s. Paris, Vienna and Amsterdam followed.
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Late 1600s to 1700s: the plantations
Yemen guarded its monopoly, but seeds and seedlings escaped. The Dutch began growing coffee in Java at the end of the seventeenth century, and Java became so associated with coffee that its name became slang for it. A coffee plant given to Louis XIV was the ancestor of plants carried to the French Caribbean in the 1720s, and coffee reached Brazil around the same time. European colonies across the Caribbean and the Americas grew coffee on plantations worked by enslaved people. That is a central part of how coffee became cheap and common.
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1800s: Brazil and the mass market
Brazil became the world's largest coffee producer in the nineteenth century, a position it still holds, much of it built on slave labour until abolition in 1888. Coffee became an everyday drink for working people across Europe and North America. In Sri Lanka, then Ceylon, coffee leaf rust destroyed the plantations in the 1870s and 1880s and the island turned to tea.
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1900 to 1950: the machines
Most of the ways we make coffee today date from this period. Luigi Bezzera patented an early espresso machine in Milan in 1901. Melitta Bentz patented a paper coffee filter in Dresden in 1908. The first commercial decaf came from Bremen in the early 1900s. The moka pot was patented in Italy in 1933. Nescafé launched instant coffee in 1938. Achille Gaggia's lever machines, from the late 1940s, created the crema that defines modern espresso.
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1950s to 1980s: coffee as a commodity
After the Second World War coffee became one of the most traded agricultural commodities in the world. Producer and consumer countries signed an International Coffee Agreement in 1962 that used export quotas to stabilise prices. Instant coffee and supermarket blends dominated in many countries. Vietnam, which had grown coffee since French colonial rule, became a major producer after the 1980s and is now second only to Brazil, mostly in robusta.
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1989 onwards: crisis and specialty
The quota system collapsed in 1989, prices fell, and many farmers were plunged into poverty, a crisis that fed the growth of Fairtrade and other certification labels. At the same time, a specialty coffee movement grew up around buying, roasting and brewing better coffee, first in the United States and then everywhere. The flat white, the cold brew and the pour-over bar all belong to this period.
Why so many coffee words are Arabic
The word coffee travelled with the drink. Arabic qahwa became Turkish kahve, which became Italian caffè and Dutch koffie, which became English coffee at the end of the sixteenth century. Mocha is the Yemeni port. Even the cezve, the small pot for Turkish coffee, and the finjan, its cup, came along the same routes. The vocabulary is a map of how coffee spread.
Why the drink looks different everywhere
Coffee arrived in each place at a different time, through different routes, and met whatever was there already. The Ottoman world had no paper filters, so it made a suspension. Vietnam had little fresh milk, so it used tinned condensed milk. Italy had pressurised steam, so it made espresso. Greece had instant coffee and a Nestlé representative with no hot water, so it made the frappé. Much of this site is, in a sense, about those accidents.
Questions
Where did coffee originate?
Arabica coffee originated in the forests of south western Ethiopia. It was first drunk as a brewed beverage in Yemen in the fifteenth century.
Who discovered coffee?
No one person. The story of the goatherd Kaldi is a legend. People in Ethiopia used the plant long before coffee was brewed in Yemen.
When did coffee come to Europe?
Coffee reached Venice early in the seventeenth century, and coffeehouses opened across Europe from the middle of that century.
When was espresso invented?
Luigi Bezzera patented an early espresso machine in Milan in 1901. Modern espresso with crema dates from Achille Gaggia's lever machines in the late 1940s.
Sources
- Mark Pendergrast, Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World The coffee trade from Yemen to the specialty era.
- Markman Ellis, The Coffee-House: A Cultural History The coffeehouses of London and Europe.
- International Coffee Organization The International Coffee Agreements and market history.