Coffee, the main constituent of American bloodstreams and a cultural icon, started off as an immoral thing, like chocolate and bathing. It has passed through the fires of condemnation century after century. Caffeine is variously praised as a great aid to something or a dietary problem of some kind. The fact is that it’s almost impossible to move anywhere on Earth without finding coffee machines and about a million different types of coffee.
In the beginning
The name “coffee has a long lineage, translated endlessly. It’s believed to stem from its place of origin. Coffee is believed to have originally come from Ethiopia, in the former Kingdom of Kaffa region, stretching through to the mountains modern Kenya. According to legend, in the 9th century a goatherd called Kaldi noticed his goat eating the red coffee berries, and tried them himself, discovering the effects of caffeine.
Coffee colonizes the world
Yemeni Arab traders were the first external customers for African coffee, and they were also the first to roast coffee in the modern way. The Arab traders, being directly linked in to the Mediterranean trade routes, were the perfect vehicle for creating a demand which never stopped spreading until it was global.
Coffee was initially a luxury drink outside its home territory, but as the Middle East trade developed through the port of Mocha in Yemen, where it was grown in Sufi monasteries, the taste spread. If you’ve ever had Arab coffee, you will have never forgotten it. Coffee is its own best sales pitch. There was no market resistance to the new drink. People couldn’t get enough of it.
Coffee was quite literally out of its original bottle by this time, and the global spread continued. Coffee arrived in Europe in around the 1570s, and the first European coffee house opened in Venice in 1645, stocking Ottoman coffee. In 1650, the Grand Coffee House opened in Oxford
The coffee legend
With coffee came a reputation. By the time it got to England, it was extolled as a great cure. In the days of the Pharmacopoeia, medicine was effectively anything which made you feel better, and coffee was a natural entry into medicinal lore.
Its popularity came also from the fact that it was useful as a pick me up. These were also the days of hard physical labor for most of the population. Coffee is a very reliable stimulant, and for very tired people, its effects would have been magical.The global coffee empire and cultures
As a commercial crop, coffee was a runaway success, and coffee was soon being grown on a large scale everywhere people knew how to grow it. Growing coffee elsewhere naturally also created many varieties of coffee, and experimentation with different flavors generated the first version of the vast, diversified coffee culture of today.
Everybody, and every country, has their preferred types of coffee and styles of drinking. From Arabic rocket fuel to its close but subtle relative Turkish coffee and the literal art forms of European coffee, and Americans whose relationship with coffee is best described as co-dependent has happened in a blink in the eye of history.
This is really only the beginning of the coffee story. Whatever happens next, it won’t be dull.
