Coffee originated on the plateaus of central Ethiopia. Either the Ethiopian province of Kaffa in Ethiopia’s southwestern highlands or the plateaus of central Ethiopia is likely the original home of the coffee plant, which was discovered growing wild around 600 AD.
By A.D. 1000, Ethiopian Arabs were collecting the fruit of the tree, which grew wild, and preparing a beverage from its beans.
During the fifteenth century traders transplanted wild coffee trees from Africa to southern Arabia.
People believed that the coffee beans were brought to Arabia from Ethiopia by Sudanese slaves who chewed the fresh coffee berries during the trip to help them survive.
The eastern Arabs, the first to cultivate coffee, soon adopted the Ethiopian Arabs' practice of making a hot beverage from its ground, roasted beans.
The Arabs' fondness for the drink spread rapidly along trade routes, and Venetians had been introduced to coffee by 1600. In Europe as in Arabia, church and state officials frequently proscribed the new drink, identifying it with the often-liberal discussions conducted by coffee house habitués, but the institutions nonetheless proliferated, nowhere more so than in seventeenth-century London.
Coffee was brought to England first by a Turkey merchant returning from a voyage to the Levant in the time of Cromwell; he was accompanied by a Greek named Pasqua who understood the art of preparing the beverage.
This man founded a Coffee house in London, which prospered so exceedingly, that it is said, twelve months there were as many Coffee houses in London as in Constantinople.
The first coffee house opened there in 1652, and a large number of such establishments(cafés) opened soon after on both the European continent(café derives from the French term for coffee) and in North America, where they appeared in such Eastern cities as New York, Boston, and Philadelphia in the last decade of the seventeenth century.
Coffee bean arrived in the New World in the 18th century. French noblemen named Gabriel De Clieu is celebrated for his role in coffee’s arrival in the Americas.
In the United States, coffee achieved the same, almost instantaneous popularity that it had won in Europe. However, the brew favored by early American coffee drinkers tasted significantly different from that enjoyed by today's connoisseurs, as nineteenth-century cookbooks make clear.
American attempts to create instant coffee began during the mid-1800s, when one of the earliest instant coffees was offered in cake form to Civil War troops.
Although it and other early instant coffees tasted even worse than regular coffee of the epoch, the incentive of convenience proved strong, and efforts to manufacture a palatable instant brew continued. Finally, after using U.S. troops as testers during World War II, an American coffee manufacturer (Maxwell House) began marketing the first successful instant coffee in 1950.
A Short History of Coffee
