European history of coffee

The first reports of coffee reached Europe through a 1582 account of his travels by Leonhart Rauwolf, a doctor and botanist from Augsburg, in which he referred to coffee as being ‘as black as ink’. However, Alpinus (Prospero Alpini), in 1591 was the first who scientifically described it.

The Dutch were the first to introduce the plant into Europe.

In 1650, the first coffeehouse opened its doors in Oxford, England, its proprietor a Turkish Jew named Jacob. Coffee houses multiply and become such popular forums for learned and not so learned.

In the early 1640s, the first European coffeehouse opened for business in Venice, Italy.

In France, the first coffeehouse opened in 1671. It was set-up in Paris by an Armenian name Pascal, but meeting with little encouragement he removed to London. He was succeeded by other Armenian and Persians.

By 1843, there were thousands of coffeehouses throughout Europe and the American colonies.

Brazilian coffee industry gets started in 1727 from seedlings smuggled out from Paris.

From the mid-seventeenth century through the mid-eighteenth, home consumption of coffee in Europe was most common among the wealthier classes.

They could more easily afford the high price of coffee, which dropped only during the course of the eighteenth century.
European history of coffee

History of coffeehouses in Vienna, Austria

Coffeehouses have served as hangouts for artists and intellectuals throughout Europe whenever they existed.

Mohammed IV mobilized an army of 300,000 men and sent it forth under his vizier, Kara Mustapha, to destroy and conquer Europe.  Reaching Vienna July 7, 1683, the army quickly invested the city and cut it off from the world.

The enemy was repulsed in 12 September 1683, and legend has it that 500 sacks of coffee beans were left behind by the fleeing Turks.

Geor Franz Koltschitzky a native of Poland, also formerly an interpreter in the Turkish army, entered Austrian history by successfully passing through the Turkish line, in disguise, in Mid-August 1683 to deliver messages about conditions in Vienna to Charles V, Duke of Lorraine, who was heading up a relief army prepared to come to the city’s rescue.

He won himself undying fame with coffee his principle reward.

After the siege of 1683, Koltschitzky brewed and sold coffee at the house in the Domgasse, quite near St, Stephen’s Square.

At first the Viennese resisted wholesale consumption of the brew because of its bitterness, but when Koltschitzky discovered by chance that the addition of sugar made the taste more palatable, trade became brisk.

On January 17, 1685, Johannes Diodato obtained the first permit in Vienna to open a coffeehouse, although he probably had operated it earlier without benefit of the legal protection from competition that the license afforded.

He finally secured a royal monopoly from Leopold I on the sale of coffee in the city for twenty years.
History of coffeehouses in Vienna, Austria

History of coffee in Europe

European travelers and botanists discussed coffee in their travelogues and treatises long before it was consumed anywhere bin the West.

Because coffee was probably brought up through the port of Venice, many historians believe the first European coffeehouse was established in Venice in about 1645.

Shortly after coffee reached Rome, it was threatened with religious fanaticism. It is related that certain priests appealed to Pope Clement VIII (1535-1605) to have its use forbidden among Christians, denouncing it as an invention of Satan.

The first recorded British coffeehouse was in Oxford. It was opened in 1650. Students and faculty patronized Jacob of the Angel, where their admission and a cup of coffee cost a penny. By early 18th century London had thousands of coffeehouses and by 1739 they outnumbered taverns.

Coffee houses multiply and become such popular forums for learned and not so learned. Only a decade after 166o did coffee take off as an item of luxury consumption; coffeehouses and cafes, the very heart of the emerging public sphere, sprouted up in cities and provincial towns throughout Europe.

In France, the first coffeehouse opened in 1672. By 1843, there were thousands of coffeehouses throughout Europe and the American colonies.

Brazilian coffee industry gets started in 1727 from seedlings smuggled out from Paris.
History of coffee in Europe 

Spread of coffee consumption throughout Europe

Spread of coffee consumption throughout Europe
Coffee consumption rapidly spread to the French-speaking cantons of Switzerland and then to the rests of that country after taking hold of France.

Cafés were extremely successful in Italy during the 18th century. There were for example, 206 cafés in Venice (where the first coffee house in Europe is said to have opened in 1645), 40 in Padua, and many others in Rome, Florence, Turin and Naples.

At that time, the Italians were already drinking concentrated and very sweet coffee, “caffe ristretto”.

In Venice, the first big cafes at the end of the 17th century were the Florian and the Quadri in Saint-Mark’s Square.

Starting around 1700, Austria and the Scandinavia countries became big customers of coffee.

The first two Swedish coffeehouses were opened in Stockholm in 1690. In 1671, Fauste Nauron of Syria, a Maronite and professor of Oriental languages in Rome, wrote in Latin the first treatise in coffee.

Cultivation of coffee trees outside of the Middle East began only at the start of the 17th century.

Dutch merchants imported the first coffee plant into Holland from Mocha in 1616.

The coffee trees were cultivated in Ceylon in 1658 and in Java in 1696. The plants of Coffea Arabica imported from Arabia were destroyed by a flood but the cuttings imported in 1699 from Malabar into Java were the origin for all the coffee trees of the East Indies as well as those of the botanical gardens of Amsterdam; from there they were eventually exported to most of the botanical gardens of Europe.

A first but unsuccessfully planting took place in Dijon in 1670. In 1713, new attempts at transplanting coffee trees from Amsterdam to Paris were once again failures.

In 1714, the burgomaster of Amsterdam offered several coffee tree plants to King Louis XIV who entrusted them to Antoine de Jussieu, director of the botanical gardens.

These plants were the ancestor of coffee plants of the former French colonies and of part of Latin America.
Spread of coffee consumption throughout Europe