Coffee

Where did coffee originate? Coffee lovers around the world today may be numbering in the millions, but only a small number could be fully aware on the beginnings of this well-loved beverage. The history of coffee is definitely as rich as its flavor, spanning numerous centuries and dating as far back as 6th century A.D.

The oldest coffee legend

In the 6th century AD, farmers from Yemen were already growing coffee cherries. According to legend, a goat herder in Ethiopia was bewildered to discover that his goats were showing inexplicable energy after consuming a particular kind of cherries. After this goat herder tried the berries for himself and found that he too felt a surge of energy, Muslims discovered a way to extract the brew from the cherries, transforming the beans into a heady beverage. Thus, coffee became a secret beverage of the Muslims for a while, revitalizing them even during lengthy periods of worship. When 900 AD came round, coffee was already commonplace in the entire region of Arabia. From this period until 1500 AD, coffee farming practices were still a well-kept secret, although coffee beans were already exported to other places.

Coffee invasion in Europe

Before long however, Europeans found a way to bring coffee seedlings into their own lands. By 1615, merchants from Venice were able to bootleg a coffee plant out of the Yemen borders and into Europe. This time, coffee was used for its therapeutic purposes, being sold both as a drink and as a health remedy. When the Dutch got hold of the Ethiopian territory, they were able to bring coffee plants into Holland.

When it was discovered that Holland’s climate was not conducive to coffee farming, the Dutch brought the plants to other regions. When the first coffee shop opened its doors to the public in Oxford, England by the year 1650, women were forbidden to enter the shops. It was only three years later, when a teahouse was opened, that women found a place to converge.

The love story behind coffee Arabica

A Brazilian coast guard officer found two things he loved when he visited Cayenne in French Guyana in 1727: one, the coffee and two, the Governor’s wife. It was this affection that led him to acquire a few seeds which he took back to Brazil, initiating the Arabica coffee variety production in the country. Brazil eventually became the world’s largest coffee producer in 1800.

Afterwards, coffee traveled from country to country, spreading its popularity as a principal beverage of choice. The British introduced coffee to Jamaica in 1730. In 1774, Americans expressed a predilection for coffee during the Boston Tea Party, as a sign that they are replacing tea with coffee, due to the exorbitant taxes levied on tea trading. Costa Rica acquired coffee from Cuba, and this eventually spread to Mexico. The Island of Martinique cultivated coffee in the 1700s and Hawaii in 1825.

Present day coffee and coffee houses

Coffee houses are popular in Arabia; however they are as popular in Europe as well. From the 1600′s to the mid 1900s, coffee shops had already proliferated in Paris, reaching to approximately 3,000 in number. Presently, coffee is second to oil in terms of the most traded commodity worldwide.

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Ethiopia is the widely recognized home of Arabica coffee. Unlike many other countries that carefully partition their coffee plantations, Ethiopia is the only country where even wild coffee trees account for the active harvests. But one thing in common about premium gourmet coffee, their beans are all hand picked and not machine harvested.

The downside to Ethiopian coffee is that due to wild coffee trees accounting for parts of their harvests, their products have some rough sediments that may slip into each cup especially when a percolator or French Press is used. Ethiopian coffee is best served using a filtered, drip coffee maker.

Aside from tracing their origins to the Arabica, many of today’s premium coffees owe their rich and unique taste to geography and nature. Here are three of the world’s finest which trace their roots to Arabica:

• The Ethiopian Harrar coffee. This type of coffee is grown in the eastern part of Ethiopia. Being an arid area, coffee from this region are traditionally dry. Its fruit is allowed to dry on the bean then milled to remove the fruit and husk. Due to this drying process of allowing air to circulate around the coffee, a fruit flavor is retained. In fact, some coffee reviewers have described Ethiopian Harrar as remarkable and complex with a hint of wine simply because of this sweet, fruity flavor that borders on blueberry interacting with the aroma.
• Hawaiian Kona coffee. Another one of the world’s top coffee types grown in the Kona coast of Hawaii. This Hawaiian offspring of Arabica found its way into the Kona coast by way of Brazil when a missionary first planted it in the region in the early 19th century.

  The Kona region is not as hot and dry as Ethiopia but rather tropical. Days are sunny with some rainy afternoons. What probably contributes most to the Kona bean’s distinctness is the rich volcanic soil on which it grows. Like Ethiopian Harrar, Kona coffee is sometimes identified by a flavor that hints of wine which is probably due to the same fruity property it shares with its African cousin.

• Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee.This coffee type is grown in mountainous areas that reach 5,500 feet and these are known as the Blue Mountains. The climate is similar to the Kona region, cool in the day but with much more rain. Because of its height, it is not uncommon to see mist and cloud covering much of the Blue Mountains. The locals say that it is the interaction of the mist with the coffee plants that give their coffee a bluish-green hue. Unlike Kona though, the Blue Mountains are not volcanic but its soil is made rich by its sheer altitude.

  Coffee beans were not indigenous to Jamaica. It was in 1728 that its governor brought the first Arabica beans into the islands from Martinique. And almost 300 years later, Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee is one of the world’s finest and rather hard to find at times.

As you can see, the Arabica bean has travelled the world and is already rooted in many parts. The images of Ethiopia are sometimes sad, with pictures of babies being held by their mothers all reduced to only skin and bones as a result of crushing poverty. But to those who are fortunate to find work picking the coffee berries, they have become a source of blessing for all coffee enthusiasts.

You may own the top of the line coffee maker, you may drink from the shiniest of cups, but were it not for the sweat and labor of these Ethiopian farmers, there would be none of the best coffees that money can buy.

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Coffee is one of the most popular beverages in the world. The word coffee is believed to have been deduced from Kaffa, a place situated in Ethiopia, Africa, It came into existence around 800 A.D. and there are many legends and stories associated with discovery.

One such interesting story goes like this. One day a monk saw a goatherd imitating his sheep who were dancing from one shrub to another, grazing the cherry-red berries containing coffee beans. The monk was amazed at the goatherd’s caper on eating the beans. The monk took some of the berries for his fellow monks and that night they realized that they seemed to attain something that they felt was ‘divine stimulation’.

Other than the legends and stories there is also historical evidence about how the Africans of the same era used the coffee plant in different ways. Africans used what can be called primitive ‘Power Bars’ made of coffee and animal fat as a stimulant. They also made wine from the coffee-berry pulp. From Africa, coffee moved out towards Arabia via the Red Sea and then slowly made its way to the rest of the world.

Coffee, as we know it today came into existence around 1000 A.D. and this is when it was first roasted and brewed. By the 13th Century, coffee became popular with the Muslim holy men who found it a very convenient drink it to keep worshippers awake and send them in a tizzy. Then onwards, coffee traveled with the Muslims. Wherever Islam went, coffee traveled along. However, Arabians were cautious and did not want to share the plant with the world. They made sure that no coffee bean sprouted outside Arabia and coffee beans were boiled or parched to make them infertile before taking out of Arabia.

An enterprising Indian pilgrim cum smuggler, Baba Budan, strapped some fertile coffee beans to his stomach and left Mecca. These beans were ultimately responsible for the agricultural expansion of coffee, which later reached Europe’s colonies in the East.

From these colonies, coffee was traded by a Venice merchant who took it to Europe. The Europeans liked it so much that they wanted a constant supply of the beans. And later, it was the Dutch who set up the first European-owned coffee plantation in colonial Java in 1616. The Dutch were, however, not as cautious as the Arabians and they gifted coffee trees to the aristocracy all over Europe. Louis XIV was presented one such coffee tree in 1714, for his garden in Paris.

The coffee tree finally crossed the Atlantic with Gabriel Mathieu de Clieu, a retired French naval officer. He smuggled a sprout with him to Martinique, a French Colony in the Caribbean after he was denied a clipping of the tree. Gabriel Mathieu de Clieu guarded the plant religiously. When the ship got caught in a storm de Clieu nurtured the pant with half of the water that he was rationed. Ultimately, the sprout flourished in Martinique and in the next 50 years more than 18 million coffee trees were grown there.

By 1727, Brazil had realized the potential of the plant and wanted a share in the coffee pie. Unable to get the plant through fair means, they dispatched Lt. Col. Francisco de Melo Palheta, allegedly to mediate in a border dispute, to French Guiana. Avoiding the heavily guarded coffee plantations, he chose to take the easy route of befriending the governor’s wife who slyly presented him a bouquet spiked with coffee seedlings on his farewell dinner. Coffee had now entered Brazil, a land of extremely fertile farms.

From 800 A.D. in Africa to 1727 in Brazil, the coffee plant had traveled through Middle East, South East and Europe and then to South America. Production of coffee reached dizzying heights due to the enormous harvests of Brazil’s fertile lands. This boom in production, apart from anything else, was instrumental in turning coffee, an elitist drink till then, into a drink of the masses.

Initially considered as a poor substitute for alcohol by the American colonists, its popularity grew when tea from Britain became scarce during the Revolutionary War. During and after the American Civil War, coffee had gained a premier position and was being increasingly accepted. Later, advancement in brewing technology ultimately secured its place as an everyday beverage of America.

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By the 17th Century, with the popularity of coffee ever increasing in Europe, the interest of the then World Superpowers – Britain, France, Netherlands, Portugal and Spain – also grew. Up until this point, coffee imported into Europe had come from the Arabian Peninsula, over which none of these nations had any control. The Europeans had sample coffee and liked it, and now they wanted to start producing it for themselves. The race was on to establish their own coffee plantations in their respective colonies.

It was the Netherlands who took an early lead in this race. In 1616, Dutch spies successfully managed to smuggle a coffee plant out of Mocha (Yemen). Although, to begin with, they were only involved in small scale cultivation. This changed in 1658, when they defeated the Portuguese to take control of Sri Lanka. Very soon coffee plantations spread all over Sri Lanka and into Southern India. Then, in 1699, the Dutch started production in Indonesia, when cuttings were successfully transplanted from Malabar (India) to Java.

Without help from the Dutch, the other Superpowers would not have got out the starting blocks. By 1706, the first coffee beans from Java had reached Amsterdam, along with a coffee plant for the Botanical Garden. From this plant, a number of successful cuttings were made. These new plants soon found their way into various botanical gardens throughout Europe as they were given as gifts to visiting dignitaries.

One such plant was given to King Louis XIV of France in 1714, by the Burgermeister of Amsterdam. The plant was re-homed in le Jardin des Plantes in Paris. Several years later, a French Naval Officer named Mathieu Gabriel de Clieu, while on leave from his station in Martinique, asked for the King’s permission to take a cutting of this plant back with him. Unfortunately for him, the King refused his request. Convinced that the Caribbean would be an ideal place to cultivate coffee, de Clieu led a daring moonlight raid on the Jardin des Plantes to secure a cutting.

In 1723, de Clieu began his journey back to Martinique, with his newly procured coffee cutting in tow. He kept the shoot in a glass cabinet, which he would bring up onto the deck each day so it could be warmed by the sun. If de Clieu had thought that the hard part of his mission was over, he would have been wrong. As, during the journey, one of the men on board (allegedly with a Dutch accent) tried to wrestle the plant off de Clieu, managing to break a side-shoot in the process. The crew had to fend off an attack by pirates which lasted nearly a whole day; a storm descended that shattered the glass cabinet; and the portable water supply ran so low that de Clieu had to share his water ration with the plant.

Finally de Clieu returned to Martinique, where he successfully cultivated the coffee plant. Some twenty months later de Clieu had his first harvest, which he distributed among the island’s doctors and other intellectuals. As luck would have it, at the time the cocoa plants on the island were doing badly after a recent volcanic eruption, so coffee was soon adopted by the locals. Within three years, coffee plantations spread all over Martinique and to the neighbouring islands of St. Dominique and Guadeloupe. Coffee production was so successful in the Caribbean that King Louis XIV forgave de Clieu for his earlier transgression, making him governor of the Antilles.

The coffee plant had become a very desirable object. In 1727, the Brazilian government decided it was time they joined the coffee market. Using the guise of an intermediary in a boundary dispute between the French and Dutch in the Guianas, Brazil sent Lieutenant Colonel Francisco de Mello Palheta on a mission to steal a coffee plant from the French. Using his charm and charisma, Palheta befriended the governor of French Guiana’s wife. Once the dispute was resolved, the governor’s wife presented Palheta with a farewell gift, a coffee cutting concealed in a bouquet of flowers. From this scant shoot grew the world’s largest coffee empire.

The British did not seriously compete in the coffee race until 1796, when they took control of Sri Lanka from the Dutch. With the arrival of the British, even more land was cleared for coffee plantations. So much so, that the relatively small island of Sri Lanka briefly became the world’s largest coffee producer in the 1860s. However, in 1869, a lethal fungus known as coffee rust arrived on the island. This fungus causes premature defoliation of a coffee plant, seriously weakening its structure and reducing its yield of berries. Since rust was not considered to be a serious disease, the British continued to clear more land for coffee plantations during the next decade. It was not until 1879 that they realised the seriousness of the situation. Unfortunately by then it was too late: the productivity of the plants had declined so greatly that they were no longer economically viable.

Luckily for the British, a successful marketing campaign led by the British East India Company for tea entitled “the cup that cheers”, back in the early 18th Century, had laid the foundations for tea to become the British national drink. Between 1700 and 1757 the average annual tea imports into Britain more than quadrupled and consumption continued to grow steadily for the rest of the century. So when coffee rust devastated the coffee plantations of Sri Lanka, and later India, production simply switched and the coffee plants were uprooted and replanted with tea. Although Britain continued to cultivate coffee on a limited amount of colonial land, mostly in Jamaica, Uganda and Kenya, by the end of the 19th Century tea had surpassed coffee as the beverage of choice.

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Before delving into the history and lore of Jamaica Blue Mountain coffee, we need to review the main types of coffee, which are predominantly either Robusta or Arabica varieties. The difference stems from the type of coffee plant. Robusta coffees are easier to cultivate – and its production exceeds that of Arabica coffees — but are less flavorful and less consistent in quality. Accordingly, Robusta coffees are considerably less expensive. Most national coffee blends available through retailers and supermarkets are Robusta coffees. Arabica coffees, on the other hand, are well known for consistent quality, bold flavor, and intense aroma. Premium coffees marketed as single origin coffees – Kenyan, Costa Rican, Sumatran, for example – are almost universally of the Arabica variety. Jamaica Blue Mountain coffee is an Arabica coffee.

Coffee found its way to Jamaica in 1728 when Sir Nicholas Lawes, Governor of Jamaica, imported Arabica seedlings from the island of Martinique. The new home was a natural and coffee production expanded. Unfortunately, Jamaica coffee productions also has its origins – as with other plantation crops – with the abhorrent practice of slavery.

This extraordinary coffee is grown in the majestic Blue Mountain range in Jamaica reaching approximately 7,402 feet at the highest peak. The Blue Mountains dominate the eastern third of Jamaica, located between Kingston to the south and Port Maria to the north. The upper reaches of the mountains are preserved as forest while the lower slopes are dedicated to coffee production. An incredible mix of rich soil, cool and misty conditions, high rainfall and good soil drainage yields a very high quality coffee. The foggy conditions are believed to slow the growth of the coffee, thereby producing a more dense (and flavorful) bean.

Only coffee cultivated in this mountainous range is permitted to hold the Jamaica Blue Mountain coffee label, which is a globally protected certification mark under the administration of the Jamaica Coffee Industry Board. Coffee grown at elevations between 3,000 and 5,500 feet has been traditionally known as Jamaica Blue Mountain. Coffee grown at elevations between 1,500 and 3,000 feet (910 m) is called Jamaica High Mountain, and coffee grown below 1,500-foot (460 m) elevation is called Jamaica Supreme or Jamaica Low Mountain.

Following a post-war increase in production that threatened to ruin the quality reputation of Jamaican coffee, the colonial British government instituted the Jamaica Coffee Industry Board in 1950 to maintain and standardize the quality and consistency of Jamaican coffee in a world class manner. Upon achieving independence, the new Jamaican government continued to invest in coffee cultivation. Jamaican coffee is hand picked and supervised at every stage of pulping, drying, hulling, sorting and grading according to the Board’s regulations. All Jamaica Blue Mountain coffee is wet-processed. Every export shipment is “cup quality” tested by certified tasters on the Coffee Industry Board staff. All shipments of Jamaica Blue Mountain coffee must be approved and certified by the Board

What should one expect from a cup of Jamaica Blue Mountain coffee? Jamaica Blue Mountain coffee is known for its sweet, rich flavor and a remarkable lack of bitterness. Often considered the most balanced and complete cup of coffee. Combined with its refined taste, the intense aroma adds to its allure as the world’s best coffee. Some critics, though, claim that production increases – fueled by foreign investors – have led to Jamaica Blue Mountain coffee being no better than other premium Caribbean coffees. Nonetheless, after two centuries of production, its fame and price is still upheld by coffee connoisseurs around the world.

The only way to know whether Jamaica Blue Mountain coffee is really worth the extra price, which is generally between three and four times more expensive than other premium coffees, is to try it yourself. Perhaps, a subtle suggestion or hint for your next birthday or a holiday gift will provide you the opportunity.

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