The Story of Coffee
C offee is today the second most widely traded commodity on Earth after crude oil, consumed in some form by an estimated two billion people daily. Its journey from the forests of East Africa to the cups of commuters on every continent is a story of accident, commerce, cultural transformation, and botanical ingenuity spanning more than a thousand years.
The plant that produces coffee, Coffea, is native to Ethiopia, where wild trees still grow in the highland forests of the south-west. Local communities had long made use of the plant -- chewing the ripe berries for their stimulating effect -- well before anything resembling the beverage we recognise today was developed. The Arabic-speaking world was the first to brew and trade coffee systematically. By the fifteenth century, coffee cultivation was well established in the Yemeni port of Mocha, and the drink had become an integral part of social and intellectual life across the Islamic world. Coffee houses -- known as qahveh khaneh -- proliferated in cities from Cairo to Istanbul, serving as meeting places for conversation, music, and the exchange of news in a manner that anticipated the European coffee house tradition by more than two centuries.
Coffee reached Europe through the trade networks of Venice in the early seventeenth century. The new beverage provoked controversy wherever it arrived: clergy in some cities petitioned for its prohibition on the grounds that it was an intoxicant, though the absence of alcohol eventually persuaded most authorities to permit it. By 1675, coffee houses had become such a fixture of English social life that King Charles II attempted -- unsuccessfully -- to suppress them, fearing that they had become centres of political dissent.
The global spread of coffee cultivation was driven largely by European colonial powers. Dutch merchants obtained seedlings from Yemen and established the first plantation outside Arabia on the island of Java in the 1690s. From Java, coffee plants were taken to the Amsterdam botanical gardens, and from there a seedling was presented to the King of France. This single plant, transplanted to the French colony of Martinique, became the ancestor of the vast majority of coffee trees now growing in the Americas. Brazil -- today the world's largest coffee producer -- received its first plants through a diplomatic gift in 1727.
The coffee plant itself is a woody evergreen shrub or small tree of the genus Coffea, of which approximately 124 species are known to science, though only two are commercially significant: Coffea arabica, which accounts for approximately 60 percent of global production and is prized for its complex flavour, and Coffea canephora, known commercially as Robusta, which contains more caffeine and is more resistant to disease and pests. Arabica grows best at altitudes between 600 and 2,000 metres in subtropical and tropical climates; Robusta is more tolerant of lower altitudes and warmer temperatures. Both species are harvested for their seeds -- the coffee beans -- which are contained within a fleshy red or yellow fruit known as the coffee cherry.
The processing of coffee cherries into the familiar roasted bean involves multiple stages. After harvesting, the fruit pulp is removed either by the dry method -- leaving the cherries to dry in the sun -- or the wet method, in which the pulp is mechanically stripped and the exposed beans fermented in water before drying. The dried beans are then milled to remove their remaining outer layers, sorted by size and density, and exported as green coffee. Roasting -- the transformation that develops the hundreds of aromatic compounds responsible for coffee's distinctive flavour -- takes place close to the point of consumption, since roasted beans deteriorate far more quickly than green ones.