Coffee

the origin of coffee


Until now the origin of the term coffee is disputed, most scientists agree that it may be derived from the Arabic qahwah. Coffee appears naturally in different parts of Africa. Coffea arabica, the most common and valuable type, spreads from Harrar (Ethiopia), where beans are harvested from wild trees. There it is sometimes served as a salt-filled, buttery and spice hospitality beverage, or used as an energy pill for hunters, who put it into a fat ball for their journey.

The first appearance of coffee in history is debatable. Some scientists show questionable passages in the Odyssey and the Bible as evidence of ancient coffee history. Others cite references in Arabic literature from about 800 AD. As far as world history is concerned, we can safely lay down the beginnings of coffee as a commodity by the end of the 20th century, beginning with Yemen, not Ethiopia.



Spread to Europe

Although coffee prices were high, coffee drinking habits continued to spread. By the mid-1500s, the center of coffee culture was Istanbul, Cairo, and Damascus. Men from all walks enjoy drinks and cafes, which are the center of artistic, intellectual, political, and mercantilist life (women only drink coffee at home or in a special bath).

Meanwhile, European Christians adopted the habit of drinking coffee initially because it was associated with the splendor and wealth of the Ottoman Turks, whose kingdom was at its peak in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Coffee in Europe is served in porcelain cups, freshly made from China, and on Mexican silver plates, seasoned with sugar from the Caribbean (Muslims use cardamom rather than sugar) and combined with American tobacco. As a result, coffee becomes a symbol of difference for the ruling world's economic leaders.

Coffea arabica became a middle-class drink in England, where a Greek trader was probably the first to open a coffee shop in Oxford and then in London in the mid-1600s. Indigenous English became the leading European coffee consumer until tea overshadowed the 1700s.

Other countries of Northern Europe also adopted the habit of drinking coffee, and Amsterdam became the main coffee market. This caused the Dutch to try to control production and trade. Beginning in the 1690s, Yemen's leadership position in coffee production gradually escaped as the Dutch transplanted coffee to their colonies in Java, Indonesia.

At the same time, the French began to grow coffee on the Indian Ocean and British islands of Réunion in Sri Lanka. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries witnessed the coffee colonialism. Almost all coffee is grown in Dutch, French, and English colonies abroad, with the French colony, Saint Domingue (today Haiti), becoming the world's largest coffee producer, exporting about 40,000 metric tons in 1789.