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Coffee is something we take pretty much for granted these days, but it wasn’t always this way. Believe it or not there was a time when no-one knew anything about coffee. Legend has it that the beans were discovered by an Ethiopian goatherd named Kaldi around 800 AD. He saw his goats eating the beans, tried them himself and got the world’s first coffee buzz.

Coffee in Arabia

That legend may or may not be true, but wherever it was discovered, coffee next popped up in Arabia from 1000AD onwards. Muslims took coffee with them wherever they went (and they went to lots of places in Africa, the Mediterranean and India. But the coffee legend states that they kept the secret of growing coffee very much to themselves, only ever allowing infertile beans to leave the country. Some Sufi monks also knew about coffee but that was as far as it went. The story goes that around the 1600s an Indian pilgrim called Baba Budan managed to smuggle out some fertile beans leading to the flourishing of coffee drinking in other parts of the world. It was time for Europe to get a piece of the coffee action.

A Merchant of Venice

The next chapter of the coffee story saw a Venetian merchant introducing coffee, paving the way for the Dutch to figure out how coffee was produced. It took the Dutch 80 years from the establishment of a coffee plant in 1616 to setting up a coffee estate in what is now Indonesia in 1696. Once the Dutch had coffee, it spread around Europe and from there to other parts of the world. One French naval officer smuggled it out to Martinique where it grew well and was used to supply Latin America.

Brazil Gets Coffee

Believe it or not, one of the world’s great coffee producers, Brazil, didn’t have coffee back until the 18th century and there were some shady dealings to get it. Lt. Col. Francisco de Melo Palheta was given the task of getting some beans so that the country could grab their share of the market. According to the story, he sweet talked the wife of the governor of French Guiana to get the seedlings that would pave the way for a massive coffee empire.

Once Brazil got involved, it was only a matter of time before coffee became something that everyone could drink. Wonder what that goatherd would have made of it?

About the Author

Freelance blogger Sharon Hurley is fascinated by the history of coffee.  She writes for the UK’s no. 1 bottled water cooler supplier Eden Springs who also have office coffee machine hire.

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