Coffee

Sufis brew it for the night prayers

In fifteenth century Yemen, Sufi Muslims drank coffee to stay focused through night prayers. By 1414 the plant was known in Mecca. A drink that began as a devotional aid had a long road ahead of it, and it did not stay in the mosque.

Mecca bans it and the sultan relents

In 1511 conservative imams at a theological court in Mecca forbade coffee because of its stimulating effect. The ban did not hold. By 1524 an order from the Ottoman sultan Suleiman I, with a fatwa from the Grand Mufti Ebussuud, allowed coffee drinking again.

Istanbul opens the first coffeehouse

Two Arab merchants, Hakem of Aleppo and Shems of Damascus, opened the first coffeehouse in Istanbul in 1554, in the Tahtakale district. A room built around a single drink had arrived in the Ottoman capital, and the idea would travel well.

Mocha, the narrow door

Until the end of the seventeenth century, Yemen was the world's main coffee producer, and the port of Mocha was the largest shipping point for the crop. The Dutch would soon plant their own on Java. For generations the world's coffee left Arabia through one narrow door.

Venice pours the first European cup

The first coffeehouse in Europe outside the Ottoman Empire and Malta opened in Venice in 1645. A trading city on the water went first, which surprises nobody. Oxford in England followed in 1650, and the drink began its long walk north.

Pasqua Rosée sells it in London

Pasqua Rosée, servant to a Levant Company merchant, opened a coffeehouse in St Michael's Alley off Cornhill, near the Royal Exchange, in 1652, two years after Oxford's first. His handbill, The Vertue of the Coffee Drink, is the earliest known advertisement for coffee.

A coffee house becomes an insurance market

Edward Lloyd's coffee house on Tower Street, first recorded in the London Gazette in 1688, drew sailors, merchants and shipowners hungry for news of ships. Underwriters gathered there and moved to Lombard Street in 1691. A cup bought you a seat near the news.

The Dutch plant Java

The Dutch first planted arabica seedlings at Batavia in 1696, and a flood destroyed them. A second shipment in 1699, brought by Hendrik Zwaardecroon, took root. The first commercial exports to Europe left Java in 1711, and Indonesia became the first place outside Arabia and Ethiopia to grow coffee widely.

A Java tree stands in Amsterdam

By 1706 a plant grown from Java stock stood in Amsterdam's botanical garden. A plant followed to the royal gardens in France in 1714. Much of coffee's journey to the Americas would start in greenhouses like these, one careful cutting at a time.

Palheta smuggles seed into Brazil

Lieutenant Colonel Francisco de Melo Palheta smuggled coffee seeds out of French Guiana, and Brazil's first coffee plantation followed in 1727. By 1852 Brazil was the world's largest producer, and it has held that place ever since. A handful of smuggled seed became a national landscape.

The Tea Party turns Americans to coffee

The Boston Tea Party of December 1773 pushed American drinkers toward coffee. By the Revolutionary War, tea was scarce and resisting British goods was a habit, so demand for coffee grew until dealers hoarded stock and raised prices sharply. A boycott of tea turned into a country of coffee drinkers.

Haiti supplies half the world

By 1788 Saint-Domingue, the French colony that is now Haiti, supplied half the world's coffee, grown on plantations worked by enslaved people. Brazil would not become the largest producer until 1852. Half the planet's morning habit rested on one island.

Rust empties Ceylon's coffee estates

Coffee leaf rust, caused by the fungus Hemileia vastatrix, was reported in Ceylon in 1867. By 1890 the island's coffee industry was nearly destroyed, with cultivated land down 80 percent. Planters turned to tea, and the hills were never coffee country again.

French missionaries plant Kenya

French Holy Ghost Fathers brought coffee trees from Réunion to Kenya in 1893. In the 1930s breeders at Scott Agricultural Laboratories would select SL28 from a Tanganyikan population and SL34 from a French Mission tree, and Kenya's famous cup took shape.

Robusta gets a name and a road

Louis Pierre named Coffea canephora in 1895 from a Gabon sample, and the description was published in 1897. Seeds from the Congo went to Brussels and then Java around 1900, where farmers welcomed a plant that yielded well and seemed to resist rust.

The quotas collapse

On 4 July 1989 the Coffee Council suspended export quotas, after members failed to agree on new ones and Brazil refused to cut its share. The average indicator price fell from 1.34 dollars a pound in the five years before to 77 cents in the five after.

Cup of Excellence pays for quality

The Cup of Excellence began in 1999, an annual competition that picks the best coffees of a country and sells winners to the highest bidder in internet auctions. Its roots lie in the International Coffee Organization's Gourmet Coffee Project of 1995 to 2000.

The price hits the floor

In September 2001 the coffee price reached 41 cents a pound, the lowest in real terms in 100 years, against about 1.20 dollars in the 1980s. Vietnam and Brazil had flooded the market, and farmers sold possessions to meet their debts.

Bezzera and Pavoni make espresso a machine

Luigi Bezzera applied on 19 December 1901 for a patent, granted in 1902, on a machine to prepare and serve coffee at once. Desiderio Pavoni bought the patent in 1903 and began building machines in a Milan workshop, about one a day.

Nescafé arrives from a Brazilian surplus

Nestlé introduced Nescafé in Switzerland on 1 April 1938. The project grew out of a Brazilian coffee surplus after the 1929 crash, and Max Morgenthaler led the work. During the Second World War the American plant's output went to the military.

Gaggia gives espresso its crema

Achille Gaggia patented a steamless machine in 1938 that forced water through the grounds at high pressure, producing the crema espresso is known for. His company was incorporated in 1948. Lever machines like his gave us the phrase pulling a shot.

Governments fix the price

The first International Coffee Agreement, in 1962, set export quotas for producing countries to keep prices high and stable. Quotas rose and fell with an indicator price measured against a target, and the system did raise and steady prices for years.

Alfred Peet roasts dark in Berkeley

Alfred Peet, a Dutch immigrant, opened Peet's Coffee, Tea and Spices on Vine Street near the Berkeley campus in 1966. He sold hand-roasted beans, not cups, and introduced Americans to darker roasted arabica. The Starbucks founders later called on him as a mentor.

Starbucks opens at Pike Place

Jerry Baldwin, Zev Siegl and Gordon Bowker opened Starbucks at Pike Place Market in Seattle on 30 March 1971. For its first decade it sold whole beans and equipment. Howard Schultz bought the company in 1987 and made it a chain of coffeehouses.

Esmeralda shows the world Geisha

At the first Best of Panama auction in 2004, the Peterson family's Hacienda La Esmeralda entered a Geisha lot that judges found distinctly unusual. The winning bid was 21 dollars a pound. Prices for the variety have climbed ever since.

Rust sweeps Latin America

In 2012 coffee leaf rust surged across ten Latin American and Caribbean countries, and Central America's output fell 16 percent. From 2012 to 2014 it caused about a billion dollars in damage and affected over 2 million people. In Honduras alone, 30,000 farmers lost more than half their production capacity.

World Coffee Research is founded

World Coffee Research was founded in 2012 with participation and funds from about thirty coffee industry groups, and the plant geneticist Timothy Schilling at its start. It applies genetics and agronomy to new varieties and to the threat of climate change.

Kew warns about wild Arabica

A November 2012 study by Kew and Ethiopian researchers projected that wild arabica could lose about 65 percent of its suitable locations by 2080 in the best case, and be nearly extinct in the worst. Aaron Davis called it a baseline for action.