Coffee 201
A History of Coffee
OVERVIEW
Everyone loves a good Colombian espresso, but… coffee isn’t native to Colombia. How did it get there? And where did espresso come from? Coffee has become quite the ubiquitous beverage, but it wasn’t always that way, and it was through a network of global trade over time that coffee spread throughout the world.
The Red Sea Coffee Trade
Coffee is originally from the regions surrounding the Red Sea, specifically Ethiopia, Somalia, and Yemen, in areas around the ancient Kingdom of Axum (one of the biggest world powers at the time, and very poorly represented by history books). The coffee plant is a shrub which grows in the Ethiopian highlands and has small, red fruit. Coffee was discovered, legend has it, in the 10th Century, when an Ethiopian-Arab goat herder discovered his goats leaping around with wild energy after eating the fruit off the coffee shrub. The story is a whole saga, and is probably made up, as it was first recorded over 800 years after it supposedly took place, but it’s still a fun story. Regardless, for a number of years, coffee was consumed as a food product, the fruits eaten by workers for energy during the day.
It wasn’t until a few centuries later that coffee was developed as a beverage in nearby Yemen, originally by making a wine from the coffee fruit, but eventually in the method we know today of roasting and grinding up the seeds of the fruit. It was shipped from Somali ports, which at that time were some of the most important and successful ports in the world, shipping between East Africa, India, and the Middle East. The receiving Yemeni port was the city of Mokha, which is the origin of Mocha (referring originally to a coffee with a distinctly rich, chocolatey flavor, and later to a coffee with chocolate added) and the popular Moka Pot brewer invented in 1933, both named after that port city.
Turkish Coffee
Coffee expanded from the Red Sea into the very powerful Ottoman Empire (based in modern day Turkey) and spread with them as they expanded and conquered other parts of the world. The world's first coffeehouse was opened in Istanbul in 1555. This is why a traditional method of coffee brewing is referred to as “Turkish Coffee.” Coffee shops served coffee along with rose-flavored Turkish Delight and were social gathering places, where people would discuss philosophy, listen to poetry, and play games like backgammon. The coffee itself was flavored with cardamom, mastic (tastes like pine), or ambergris (whale bile! that tastes like musk and isopropyl alcohol, cause you know, sure.)
Coffee shops caused a great deal of concern in the Muslim world, as it was feared that they would replace mosques as public gathering places, and cause the people to be rebellious and intoxicated. The Ottoman government sent spies to eavesdrop on coffeehouse conversations to root out insurrection attempts, and one sultan even attempted to ban drinking coffee under penalty of death, but it was poorly enforced and completely ineffective. Coffeehouses became a central cultural institution in the Islamic world of the early modern period, and a common breaking-down point of social barriers, drawing together diverse sections of the population including academics, idlers, businessmen, government officials, and even foreign travelers to socialize. They were significant for expanding the location of hospitality from the home to a “fourth space” (after home, work, and mosque).
Developing the European Coffee Tradition
Coffee arrived in Europe through contact with the Ottoman Turks. Inspired by experiences in coffeehouses in the Ottoman Empire, European merchants brought the tradition back to Europe. The main importer of coffee in Europe was the massive port of Venice (within modern day Italy) which had strong trade connections to East Africa and the Arabian Peninsula (hence the term for the most common coffee variety, “arabica”). The first European coffeehouse was founded in Venice in 1645. Later, fancy cafes in Paris would have hanging chandeliers and marble tabletops, and patrons would drink coffee and eat “ices” (sorbet), both of which originated from the Ottoman Turks and reflected the fashionable “Turquoiserie”: the long-prevailing European obsession with all things exotic and Ottoman.
Coffee spread in popularity across Europe as a drink of both the royalty and the average person. However, it was in Vienna, Austria that a massive coffeehouse culture developed that laid the foundation for what we come to think of as “European Coffee”. Vienna is widely considered to be the birthplace of the cappuccino, a mixture of coffee and frothed milk, so named due to its similarity in color to the light brown robes of Capuchin monks. Coffeehouse culture in Vienna mirrored the diverse cross-section of society seen in the Ottoman Empire, with the mega-diverse Holy Roman Empire (centered in modern day Germany, but including parts of northern Italy and elsewhere) finding expression within those gathering spaces.
In England, coffee shops were often synonymous with “penny universities”, so called due to the fact that someone could spend a penny to receive a coffee drink and then engage in stimulating intellectual conversations.
Global Expansion
As demand for coffee grew, efforts to grow it outside of the Arab world increased, and unsurprisingly, it was the enterprising Dutch and the world’s first multinational corporation, the Dutch East India Company, that succeeded in that regard. They managed to acquire (according to some accounts, steal) one of the closely guarded coffee plants from Mocha, Yemen and plant it in a botanical garden in Amsterdam. The Dutch cultivated these plants in areas they controlled: the Kingdom of Kandy in Ceylon (Sri Lanka), southern India, and the Dutch colony of Java. Within a few years, much of Europe’s coffee was grown in Java, which is why we still call coffee “Java”.
A hundred years later, the Mayor of Amsterdam gifted* a seedling from that stolen coffee plant to the King of France in 1714. A seedling from that tree, which had been planted in the Royal Botanical Garden in Paris, was shipped across the Atlantic and brought to the Caribbean after a harrowing voyage that involved a storm, a pirate attack, and someone intentionally trying to kill the coffee plant. Coffee was then cultivated throughout the Caribbean, South, and Central America. One particularly wild story from that era features the wife of the governor of French Guiana being so enamored with a handsome Portuguese explorer that she secretly hid a pouch of coffee seeds within a bouquet of flowers for him, allowing him to establish the massively successful coffee farms of nearby Brazil.
(* this seedling was also possibly stolen — a LOT of coffee espionage around this time period)
Espresso and the Modern Coffee
Italy, as you might have guessed, played a huge role in the modernization of coffee, specifically the Northern Italian city of Turin. Though the first prototype espresso machines were built by Frenchmen, the first recognizably modern, steam-powered pressurized coffee brewers were made in Turin in the 1880s. These espresso machines reached global attention after an espresso-based coffee shop served coffee at a 1906 World’s Fair Expo in Milan, Northern Italy. The event saw millions of visitors from around the world exploring the latest developments in fine arts, engineering, and industry. This revolutionary “espresso” (meaning “made on the spot/made in a moment”) was a huge hit.
However, for many years, Espresso was a regional drink in Northern Italy around the cities of Genoa, Milan, and Turin (it also, interestingly enough, returned to the origins of coffee itself through Italian influence in the Horn of Africa, to Italian Somalia and Eritrea, as well as back to the birthplace of coffee: Ethiopia). The spread of espresso to the United States was facilitated by World War II, when American soldiers fighting in Italy were surprised by the highly-concentrated espresso coffee drank by the locals. Due to its strength, it was common for Americans to water it down to make it more palatable and similar to their familiar brewed coffee. This led to Italians mockingly referring to this watered down espresso as an “Americano.”
Italian styles of coffee flourished in the post-war 1950s, with GIs interested in bringing back the “exotic” foamy cappuccinos and espresso-based drinks they’d experienced in Italy and elsewhere in Europe. In the United States, coffee and espresso went through several evolutions over the past century. These are often referred to as “waves”, and it is those three waves of coffee that we’ll discuss in the next Coffee 201!