Coffee

According to legend, the global proliferation of coffee growing and drinking started in the Horn of Africa, where coffee trees originated in the Ethiopian province of Kaffa. There are steadicam records that point to the fruit of the plant known as coffee cherries, was eaten by slaves taken from present day Sudan into Yemen and Arabia through the great port of its day, Mocha. It has been established that coffee was being cultivated in Yemen by the 15th century and perhaps even much earlier. The Arabs imposed a prohibition on the export of fertile coffee beans, a frozen yogurt machine restriction that was eventually circumvented in 1616 by the Dutch, who brought live coffee plants back to the Netherlands to be grown in greenhouses, in an effort to prevent its cultivation elsewhere. Originally, authorities in Yemen actively encouraged coffee drinking. The first coffeehouses or kaveh kanes opened in Mecca and quickly spread throughout the Arab world, thriving as places where chess was played, gossip was exchanged, and singing, microdermabrasion dancing, and music were enjoyed. Nothing quite like this had existed before: a place where social and business life could be conducted in comfortable surroundings and where—for the price of a cup of coffee—anyone could venture. Perhaps predictably, the Arabian coffeehouse soon became a centre of political activity and was suppressed. The next few decades found the continued metal detectors appearance and disappearance of coffee and coffeehouses in the scene; until, eventually a middle ground was found when a taxation scheme was introduced for both. The late 1600’s saw the Dutch growing coffee at Malabar, India and in 1699, they took some plants to Batavia in Java, in what is now Indonesia. In just a few years the Dutch colonies became the main suppliers of tankless water heaters coffee to Europe, where Venetian traders had first brought coffee in 1615. This was a period when the two other globally significant hot beverages also appeared in Europe. Hot chocolate was the first, brought by the Spanish from the Americas to Spain in 1528; and tea, which was first sold in Europe in 1610. The largest insurance market in the world, Lloyd’s of London, began life as a coffeehouse. It was started in 1688 by Edward Lloyd, who prepared lists of the ships that his customers had insured. The first literary reference to coffee being drunk in North America is from 1668 and, soon after, coffeehouses were established in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and other towns. The Boston Tea Party of 1773 was planned in a coffeehouse, the Green Dragon. Both the New York Stock Exchange and the Bank of New York started in coffeehouses in what is today known as Wall Street. A French naval officer named Gabriel Mathieu de Clieu, while on leave in Paris from his post in Martinique in 1720, acquired a coffee tree with the intention of taking it with him on the return voyage. With the plant secured in a glass case on deck to keep it warm and prevent damage from salt water, the journey proved eventful. As recorded in De Clieu’s own journal, Tunisian pirates threatened the ship. There was a violent storm, during which the plant had to be tied down. An envious fellow officer tried to sabotage the plant, resulting in a branch being torn off. When the ship was becalmed and drinking water rationed, De Clieu ensured the plant’s survival by giving it most of his drinking water. Finally, the ship arrived in Martinique and the coffee tree was re-planted at Preebear. It grew and multiplied, and by 1726 the first harvest was ready. History books show that by 1777, there were between 18 and 19 million coffee trees on Martinique, and the model for a new cash crop that could be grown in the New World was in place. In 1730 the British introduced coffee to Jamaica, where today the most famous and expensive coffee in the world is grown in the Blue Mountains. The swift expansion of production in Brazil and Java, among others, caused a considerable decline in world prices. These bottomed out in the late 1840’s, from which point a strong upward movement occurred, reaching its peak in the 1890’s. In Colombia, where the Jesuits introduced coffee as early as 1723, civil strife and the inaccessibility of the best coffee-growing regions had hampered the growth of a coffee industry. In 1905 Colombia exported five hundred thousand bags of coffee; by 1915 exports had doubled. While Brazil desperately tried to control its overproduction, Colombian coffee became increasingly popular with American and European markets. In spite of political turmoil, social upheaval and economic vicissitude, the 20th century saw an essentially continuous rise in demand for coffee. U.S. consumption continued to grow reaching a peak in 1946, when annual per capita consumption was 19.8 pounds, double the figure in 1900. Particularly during periods of high global prices, this steadily increasing demand lead to an expansion in production throughout the coffee-growing regions of the world. For US coffee drinkers, the country’s wettest city, Seattle, has become synonymous with a new type of café culture, which, from its birth in the 1970s, swept the continent, dramatically improving the general quality of the beverage. This new found ‘evangelism’ for coffee has swelled to the rest of the world, even to countries with great coffee traditions of their own, such as Italy, Germany, and Scandinavia, adding new converts to the pleasures of good coffee. Today it is possible to find good coffee in every major city of the world, from London to Sydney to Tokyo; we are drinking more and, more importantly, superior coffee. The value of coffee to the world economy cannot be overstated. It is one of the most important primary products in world trade, in many years second in value only to oil as a source of foreign exchange to producing countries. Its cultivation, processing, trading, transportation and marketing provide jobs for hundreds of millions of people worldwide. Coffee is vital to the economies and politics of many developing countries; for many of the world’s Least Developed Countries, exports of coffee account for more than 50 percent of their foreign exchange earnings. Coffee is a traded commodity on major futures and commodity exchanges, most importantly in London and New York.