Some Key Historical Milestones in Coffee

Origins of Coffee

 

Almost everyone who is into coffee knows the story of the Ethiopian shepherd named Khaldi whose goats became hyper-active one night after eating coffee cherries from a bush growing near to them…and so the story goes, was how coffee was discovered. In a recent publication by Ferreira et al: Introduction to Coffee Plant and Genetics, in Coffee: Production, Quality and Chemistry, 2019, pp. 1-25 DOI: 10.1039/9781782622437-00001; the following paragraph summarises the origin of the key commercially utilised coffee species.

 

Coffea arabica (arabica coffee) species has its primary centre of diversity in the southwestern Ethiopian highlands (in altitudes between 1000 and 2000 metres), the Boma Plateau of Sudan and Mount Marsabit of Kenya. Coffea canephora (robusta coffee) has colonized various regions in Central Africa, stretching from West Africa through Cameroon, Central African Republic, Congo, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda and northern Tanzania down to northern Angola. In general, Coffea liberica (Liberia coffee or balata coffee as it is called here in Trinidad) habitats are localized to the same regions where Coffea canephora grow.

 

Export and Theft

 

An interesting account of the history of the spread of coffee cultivation and its use is contained in the true story of a young Yemeni American man who struggles and eventually brings Yemeni coffee to commercial outlets in the USA. The book of this account written by Dave Eggers, is called The Monk of Mokha and was published in 2018 by Penguin Random House, UK. The following paragraphs are extracted from that book and summarise how coffee got out of Yemen and was established in other countries around the world.

 

Before the 1500s –Yemen was the home to the first arabica coffee cultivation and organized coffee trade with other countries. Coffee was apparently grown there for centuries. Ali Ibn Omar al-Shadhili, a Sufi holy man living in Mokha (a port city in southwestern Yemen) who first brewed the coffee bean into a semblance of what we now recognize as coffee…then known as qahwa. He and his fellow Sufi monks used the beverage in their ceremonies celebrating god, which lasted long into the night. They brought coffee to all other in North Africa and the Middle East. The Turks turned qahwa into kahve, which became in other languages coffee.

 

Al-Shadhili became known as the Monk of Mokha and Mokha became the primary point of departure for all the coffee grown in Yemen and destined for faraway markets. However, exporting coffee plants or coffee cherries was a crime. Men had been arrested and executed for the high treason of trying to leave port with a coffee seedling.

 

1500s - Bada Budan was a Muslim holy man from the Chikmagalur district of Karnataka, India in the 1500s went to Mecca to perform the hajj. On the way back travelling through Yemen, he encountered coffee, by then known as the ‘wine of Islam’. He was not permitted to bring back the cherries or unroasted beans or plants to India, but could get as much roasted beans as he wanted. So, he stole them…strapping 7 cherries to his belly and wrapped his robe loosely over them. In India he planted the seeds in the Chandragiri Hills and from those, millions of arabica plants eventually flourished. India was the 6^th largest producer of coffee in the world in 2018.

 

1600s – Coffee had first come to Europe in 1615, when it was first exported from Mokha to Venice and used initially for medicinal purposes, until wider social consumption increased its popularity throughout Europe. The trade in coffee was controlled by the Venetians, but the Dutch wanted their own control of coffee. In 1616 a Dutchman named Pieter van den Broecke was able to steal seedlings from the port city of Mokha in southwest of Yemen, while working for the Dutch East India Company. These seedlings were sent to the Hortus Botanicus in Amsterdam, Holland. Plants from these were sent to the Dutch colony of Ceylon in 1658 and later to Java where it thrived. Java soon became the primary supplier of coffee to Europe and Mokha’s primacy waned. Coffee was also introduced as a beverage to the colonies in North America by the Dutch in the 1600s.

 

1700s – The mayor of Amsterdam presented the French King Louis XIV with a coffee plant in 1713 as a gift. It was kept at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris. In 1723 a coffee plant was taken to the French colony of Martinique in the West Indies by a French naval officer Gabriel de Clieu. That led to the development of a coffee industry that became the leading cash crop for the island and later spread to all of the French territories in the West Indies. In 1727 a Portuguese army officer Francisco de Melo Palheta based in Brazil was sent to Cayenne (French Guiana) to broker a border dispute between the French Guiana and Dutch Guiana. He was able to ‘convince’ the Governor’s wife Marie-Claude de Vicq de Pontgibaud to help him smuggle some coffee cherries out of the country. These cherries were first planted in the Para region of Brazil and by 1840 Brazilian coffee accounted for 40% of the world’s production.

 

First coffee plants in Trinidad

 

…soon to follow this post, so stay tuned!