Coffee History

    Botanical evidence indicates that the history of the coffee bean began on the plateaus of central Ethiopia and somehow must have been brought to Yemen where it was cultivated since the 6th century. However no direct evidence has been found indicating where in Africa coffee grew or who among the natives might have used it as a stimulant or even known about it, earlier than the 17th century. From Ethiopia, coffee was said to have spread to Egypt and Yemen. The earliest evidence of coffee drinking or knowledge of the coffee tree dates back to the 15th century, in the Sufi monasteries in Yemen. By the 16th century, it had reached the rest of the Middle East, Persia, Turkey, and northern Africa. Coffee then spread to Italy, and to the rest of Europe, to Indonesia, and to the Americas.

      Coffee was noted in Ottoman Aleppo by the German physician botanist Leonhard Rauwolf, the first European to mention it, as chaube, in 1573; Rauwolf was closely followed by descriptions from other European travellers. Venetian merchants introduced coffee-drinking to the wealthy in Venice, charging them heavily for the beverage. The first European coffee house (apart from those in the Ottoman Empire, mentioned above) was opened in Venice in 1645.

      The first coffee plantation in Brazil occurred in 1727 when Lt. Col. Francisco de Melo Palheta smuggled seeds, still essentially from the germ plasm originally taken from Yemen to Batavia. By the 1800s, Brazil's harvests would turn coffee from an elite indulgence to a drink for the masses. The success of coffee in 17th-century Europe was paralleled with the spread of the habit of tobacco smoking all over the continent during the course of the Thirty Years' War (1618–1648). For many decades in the 19th and early 20th centuries, Brazil was the biggest producer of coffee.