Coffee - The history

According to a legend, an Ethiopian goatherd named Kaldi observed his goats were being very lively, dancing around atree with bright red cherries. After a while, he determined that the red cherries were making his goats behave in this manner and he decided to try them himself. These cherries were then used by the monks in a local monastery to stay awake during long sessions of prayer, and were later distributed to other monasteries.

Botanical evidence shows that coffee plants originate on the plateau of central Ethiopia. Coffee still grows there wild in the forests. It was cultivated by Ethiopian people, and later brought to Yemen, where its cultivation started in the 6th century, and where Europeans first found it.

Coffee use spread around the Arab world, however they refused to let the fertile seeds leave their lands. Some time around 1650, a Muslim pilgrim from India called Baba Budan managed to sneak seven seeds back home, where he planted them in the hills near Chickmaglur in south India.

The Dutch eventually carried coffee to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and then to Java, where commercial coffee growing was established at the beginning of the 18th century. At this point, coffee became popular as the everyday pleasure of the noble and rich Europeans. Coffee was available either from Mocha, the main port in Yemen, or from Java - hence the famous blend "Mocha Java".

In 1715, French king Louis XIV managed to procure a single coffee tree from the Dutch. A special greenhouse was constructed to house the tree, where it flowered and bore fruit. The first seedlings from this tree reached Martinique in the Caribbean about 1720. A single tree survived the journey, was planted and 50 years later there were 18,680 coffee trees in Martinique. Coffee cultivation was also established in most of other islands of the Caribbean, Haiti and Mexico.

Other seedlings from the tree in France were taken to the island of Reunion (once called the Isle of Bourbon), where a new cultivar/varietal called bourbon was produced. These coffee plants were later taken to Brazil ande Mexico and coffees of bourbon variety from Latin America are among world's best.

The final journey of coffee around the world took place in 1893, when coffee seeds from Brazil were introduced into Kenya and Tanzania, very close to the original birthplace of coffee.

Back to Coffee essentials in the Learning section.