From Kaffa With Love – How Coffee Conquered the World

South Sea Bubble is perhaps one of history’s best-known financial bubbles and also was among the first. It was a product of the “Financial Revolution” which began in Britain in the late 17th century. An equal but often neglected revolution that contributed significantly to the bubble was the one of “Coffee Houses”, two of which, Jonathan's Coffee House and Garraway's, situated in the exchange alley if London, came to be the primary locations for buying and selling of South Sea Company stock. These coffee houses as they were called back then served as information hubs, spreading and disseminating news and rumours about the South Sea Company and other ventures, which stoked speculation and hype during the bubble's peak in 1719-20.

The first coffee house in England, Jacob’s was opened in 1652 in Oxford by a man of Turkish origin and named it after him. In the same year, London saw its first coffeehouse, "The Sign of Pasqua Rosee's Head", located in St Michael's Alley and opened by Pasqua Rosee, who was an Armenian-born servant of a British merchant named Daniel Edwards of the Levant Company, which in the seventeenth-century had monopoly over England’s trade with the Ottoman Empire. Soon the popularity of these coffee houses grew exponentially, and London’s coffee-drinking culture spread beyond St Michael’s Alley, as coffee houses replaced taverns as spaces for businessmen to socialise. By 1663, less than a decade after Pasqua Rosee opened, there were 83 coffeehouses in London and according to some sources, by 1739, London had over 600 of them. Unlike the taverns, the coffeehouses served no alcohol on the premises and women were not permitted to enter.

Over time, individual coffee houses came to be associated with a particular type of clients and professions: scholars, scientists, politicians etc. The commercial classes saw a set of coffeehouses catering to them, Lloyds for marine underwriters, Tom’s for life insurance, The Jamaica for the regional trading interests and places like Garraway’s and Jonathan’s in the Exchange Alley for stockjobbers.

After the expiry of the Licencing Act in 1695, the newspaper industry began to flourish, and the coffee houses responded by providing access to a wide range of publications. The coffee house became not just a place for discussion, but also a source of information for the news-hungry public. In the absence of financial information sources of today, such as Reuters and Bloomberg, eighteenth-century traders and investors came to rely heavily on the coffee house and the press for information about investments and market movements. These two sources of information were interdependent, since journalists obtained much of their news from the coffee house, and one of the main attractions of the latter were the newspapers provided to its clientele.

One such important coffeehouse in England’s financial history was Jonathan’s, which was a famous meeting place for stockbrokers, and founded by Jonathan Miles in 1680. Like many coffee houses in the area, it swiftly became popular for various meetings and when in 1697, the dealers of stocks and shares ran into issues at the Royal Exchange, they decided to move out and carried on their business at nearby Jonathan’s. One enterprising French trader called John Castaing, who was a frequent visitor to Jonathan’s started a publication listing stock prices, bullion prices and exchange rates and called it, “The course of Exchange and other things”. This semi-weekly paper quickly gained a good reputation and was used by many in the City and was published for a century.

Cut to three centuries later, A few years ago, I came across an article about Venture Capital scouts in the Silicon Valley employed by large VC firms like Sequoia capital, who hang around “Coffee Shops” to identify entrepreneurs and ideas that have future potential. Visit any local coffee shop in the valley and there is a hive of activity over steaming cups of coffee. Engineers, entrepreneurs, and venture capitalists huddled together exchange ideas over cups of artisan coffee and niche blends in coffee shop’s which also double-up as coworking spaces. The coffee culture in Silicon Valley reflects its fast-paced, innovative spirit and more than just the coffee, it is also about people, spaces and the unique culture that thrives at the intersection of caffeine and code.

The roots of valley’s coffee culture date back to the later part of the twentieth century, when technology companies started to proliferate and the place became the hub of innovation. Coffee became more than just a morning ritual and evolved into a symbol of the techie’s lifestyle. The influx of global tech talent brought diverse coffee preferences, contributing to a rich tapestry of coffee influences and given the spirit of the place, tech-savvy entrepreneurs saw an opportunity to elevate the coffee experience further. A symbiotic fusion of hi-tech work culture and quality coffee took root and cafés in major hubs like Palo Alto, Mountain View, and Cupertino started offering specialized brews, catering to the discerning tastes of the tech ecosystem. Coffee shops further transformed into places for networking and started to function as informal offices where informal meetings, job interviews, startup pitches. coding marathons and brainstorming sessions over cups of espresso became the norm.

How did this happen? From the seventeenth-century London Coffee Houses to twenty-first century Silicon Valley coffee culture – How did Coffee, a product virtually unknown four hundred years ago outside the Ottoman empire and grown in the remote regions of Ethiopia come to conquer the world culturally? How did a beverage, once known as “Wine of Islam” come to be consumed all around the globe, from its first appearance among the Sufi sects in fifteenth-century Arabia to the specialty coffee consumers of twenty-first century, and become one of the largest traded agricultural commodities?

Coffee comes from the Coffea genus of the large Rubiaceae family, of which 124 known species exist and only two are widely cultivated and considered commercially important, Arabica and Robusta. Arabica accounts for the majority of coffee, and all of the fine coffee as it is milder, more balanced, and has higher acidity. It is more difficult to grow but gets more attention and acceptance from coffee aficionados along with commanding a higher price on the global market. Arabica’s center of origin and diversity is the montane forests of southwestern highlands of Ethiopia, with the core wild coffee forests falling within the historical region of Kaffa.

Ethiopia scarcely receives more than a sentence or two in the histories of coffee, and Kaffa, the place that gave coffee its name rarely gets any mention at all and is also home to the world’s original coffee culture. The long-held belief that Arabica coffee came from Arabia is wrong. Not only did the Arabica coffee plant originate in Ethiopia, but so did coffee drinking. Arabs or Sufi monks are credited with inventing, developing and refining the brewing process, or even inventing it. The reason for Arabs getting the credit is that there was no early written evidence of coffee being drunk in Kaffa. The local language had no script until the 1990s and stories of coffee’s discovery and how the people here gradually came to brew the drink were told over the generations but not written down. Kaffa was an independent kingdom until the late nineteenth century, and the area was difficult to reach coupled with the unwelcoming attitude of the local rulers. The first Western travellers didn’t reach the area until the mid-nineteenth century and the coffee forests remained unknown to Westerners until the 1930s.

How was the potent brew discovered? Here is the much-repeated story of Kaldi, the Ethiopian goatherd who discovered coffee. According to legend, one day while grazing his flock, he fell asleep, and his herd of goats wandered off. They did not respond to his flute and after searching around, he found them in an excited state dancing on their hind legs. Kaldi noticed that they were eating red berries growing on the trees nearby and chewed some himself, feeling the stimulating effects. He carried these strange fruits home and following the advice from his wife, took them to the local monastery. The disinterested abbot threw them into the fire and when enticing aromas filled the room, some of the monks in the monastery took the toasted beans from the fireplace and crushed them to prepare a hot drink. After consuming the brew, the monks found themselves unusually alert during their lengthy nighttime prayers. Word spread gradually about the potent drink and so did its consumption, initially among monks and then the rest of the people.

We will never know the truth behind this story and similar tales with variations that have been around. Whatever the truth, once discovered, there was nothing stopping this potent drink from spreading. With news of its discovery, coffee spread from village to village and from province to province of the Kaffa Highlands. People of Kaffa who had coffee plants in their farms or backyards, sent these berries to their friends and families in the distant areas. Traders and Merchants took coffee farther along with their caravans, along the way also planting them at places of stop, rest, and resupply. The dried coffee berries were carried in rudimentary containers made from woven palms and strapped to mules or camels. As the containers were unsealed, beans trickled through gaps in the weave along the journey. Some of these beans would germinate and grow along the path, while locals also took these seedlings and planted them in their own gardens. The main trade routes from Kaffa travelled east to Harar and then to the Red Sea ports, which further connected to the southern ports of Arabia, where Mocha in today’s Yemen was an important port.

The Horn of Africa, the ports of which carried the trade goods from Ethiopia, juts far out into the Red Sea, a mere twenty miles across at its narrowest point, and some two hundred at its widest, from the Arabian Peninsula. This strip of sea has been a key trade route since the antiquity, connecting Egypt and the empires of the Mediterranean with India, the Indian Ocean, and the East. Tucked just inside the Red Sea’s southern entrance on the Arabian side is the port of Mocha.

Established in the thirteenth century, Mocha came to prominence after the Ottomans took control of Yemen in the mid-1500s, and Mocha grew quickly from a sleepy fishing village to a prosperous port. After the al-Qasimi dynasty ousted the Ottomans from Yemen in 1635, Mocha flourished as a key Red Sea port and important destination on the global trade network, an entrepot for spices from the Indies, Indian cotton textiles, New World silver, and Chinese silks. But coffee was its key commodity, and Yemen was the first to commercialize coffee on a large scale, and Mocha had a virtual monopoly on coffee trade for nearly two centuries. As coffee drinking spread across the Middle East and Europe, the Arabian Peninsula became synonymous with the product, and the port the sole source of beans. Mocha became so closely associated with it that coffee sold in its markets took the port’s name.

For a century after it was discovered, Ethiopia remained the only source of coffee until the 1540s. But the rising demand for coffee in the Islamic world outstripped supply as Ethiopia had to grapple with unreliable supplies due to conflicts between the empire’s Christian north and Muslim south. This led to coffee being cultivated in the highlands of the Yemeni interior between the coastal plains and capital Sana’a. Seeds from the small bean varieties found in Ethiopia were planted by peasants alongside subsistence crops on their family plots and these were the world’s first coffee farms. The region remained the only centre of commercial coffee production for two centuries.

Loaded onto Arab and Turkish ships, sacks of coffee travelled up the Red Sea to Jeddah and then Suez, where camels carried them to the warehouses of spice and coffee merchants in Cairo and Alexandria. From there, traders shipped the beans around the Mediterranean and as the demand exploded in Europe, trading companies from Europe started to cut out intermediaries and established presence at Mocha. The British East India Company established itself first in Yemen, followed by the Dutch VOC in the seventeenth century. The Dutch received permission to open a factory and export six hundred bales of coffee annually free of duty. Soon similar deals were struck by the British and the French.

For the first two centuries after it was first brewed, between 1450 to 1650, coffee was consumed almost exclusively in the Islamic world, a custom that sustained a coffee economy centred around the Red Sea. This was the world from which modern versions of the drink evolved and the foundations of the contemporary coffee shop formats derived.

The Oromo tribe, the people belonging to the Kaffa and Buno regions, prepare a variety of foodstuffs and beverages utilizing different parts of the coffee plant: Kuti is tea made from lightly roasted young plant leaves, Hoja combines the berry’s dried skins with cow’s milk, and Bunna Qela is made by mixing roasted dried coffee beans with butter and salt to produce a solid stimulating snack, carried on expeditions and eaten to heighten energy levels. But it is “Buna” as it is called that is most well-known, in which dried coffee husks are simmered in boiling water for fifteen minutes before the resultant beverage is served.

Buna crossed the Red Sea and entered Yemen during mid fifteenth century and was initially called qishr in Arabic. It was adopted by the Sufi mystics of Yemen for use in their night-time prayers as it helped them stay awake and alert. A stimulating potion called Qahwa, was incorporated into the ritual’s beginning, handed out in cups from a large vessel by the leader of the group. Qahwa initially referred simply to the religious potion and was called the “Wine of Islam”, but subsequently became the term for Arabic coffee prepared with beans alone, whereas qishr still refers to an infusion of dried fruits and spices. The travelling Sufi’s and their practices propagated coffee northwards into the Arabian heartlands of Hijaz and the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. Coffee eventually arrived at Cairo, capital of the ruling Mamluk sultanate, sometime during the 1500s, where it was first used by Yemeni students at the Al-Azhar Islamic university. While the religious practices were the driver behind coffee’s diffusion in the beginning, it was the increasing adoption as a social beverage consumed outside religious ceremonies that acted as a catalyst for further spread.

Coffee continued its diffusion across the Islamic world, carried to their homelands by Hajj pilgrims from Mecca. The Ottoman conquest of Egypt in 1516–17 facilitated its spread into the Turkish lands, reaching Damascus in 1534 and Istanbul in 1554, where two coffee houses were opened by the Syrians, Hakam and Shem. Situated in the city’s downtown quarters, near the port and central markets, these coffee houses were a magnet for the elites of the city, including poets, merchants and Turkish officials. It was called Kahve by the Turks and was different from the brew that Arabs made. While the Arabs served Qahwa as a semi-translucent, light brown liquid, the Turkish Kahve was a dark and opaque beverage. In the Ottoman world, coffee house’s appeal lay in providing the first legitimate public space for socialization among Muslim men and created possibilities for new forms of social interaction. So popular were coffee houses in Istanbul that by 1564, ten years after the first one opened, there were fifty of them, which supposedly reached six hundred by 1595.

Outside of the Ottoman empire, only few Europeans who travelled east on trade or adventure had tasted coffee before the middle of the seventeenth century. Its introduction into Europe led to the creation of the coffee house and café culture, which quickly spread across the booming bourgeois and middle classes across the continent. As in the Islamic world, coffee’s popularity in Europe was immediate and its spread exponential. Venice was probably the first European city in which coffee was brewed, its presence first recorded in 1575 and first shipments starting in 1624, but a coffee house did not open there until 1683. As I pointed out in the beginning of this post, London was home to Europe’s first coffee houses, while the French were late converts from chocolate, they went on to dominate both consumption and production during the eighteenth century. Coffee trading was present in the French port of Marseilles in the early seventeenth century, but its consumption started in Paris only in 1669, when a diplomatic mission sent by Sultan Mehmed IV to Louis XIV arrived in Paris and during the course of their one year stay, they entertained influential courtiers with Turkish coffee, and it was an Armenian named Pascal who established the first Parisian coffee house in 1671 and he fashioned it on an Ottoman coffee house. A few years later one of Pascal’s waiters, the Sicilian Francesco Procopio dei Coltelli, founded the still-running Café Le Procope, an elegant place that welcomed ladies. By 1720 there were an estimated 280 cafés in Paris, which grew to around 1,000 in 1750 and 1,800 in 1790, catering to the entire cross-section of the French society.

But it was the coming of Koffie as the Dutch called it to Amsterdam that revolutionized the spread of what the British would later call Coffee. It was first introduced in 1616, by a Dutch merchant Pieter van den Broecke who brought coffee bushes from Yemen and these plants were cultivated in the Amsterdam Botanical Garden. Amsterdam’s first coffee house opened in 1665 and many more opened around places where the Dutch traders gathered. But like anything that the Dutch did in the seventeenth, trade took priority over consumption and soon the Dutch East India company, VOC established a monopoly on coffee trade and would become the source for the rapid spread of coffee planting.

Coffee’s growing popularity led European trading companies to try and secure supplies, but the scarcity became acute in 1707 when the Ottoman administration imposed an export ban on coffee outside the empire. Mocha successfully held a monopoly as a source of beans and jealously guarded its secrets, with authorities forbidding foreigners from visiting coffee farms and reportedly only allowed beans to be exported once they had been boiled and their ability to germinate destroyed. In 1670, according to legend, Indian Sufi saint Baba Budan, stopping in Mocha on his way home from performing the hajj, allegedly hid seven seeds in his waistband and carried them to his native near Mysore.

Dutch merchants were buying large quantities of coffee from the Arab traders in the ports of eastern Mediterranean and Mocha, who held a near-exclusive control and fixed prices. Dutch traders of the VOC were quick to grasp the potential of growing and transporting coffee, as the dried pods could be stored in the hold of a ship and transported to Europe. They methodically sought to learn as much as they could about the plant by gathering information on trips to Mocha, Alexandria, and Venice. In 1696, a VOC ship took stock from South India’s Malabar Coast, descendants of the seeds that Baba Budan had carried from Mocha and planted them in western Java in the highlands outside Batavia, where coffee grew well in Java’s volcanic-rich soil. Regular shipments from Java to Holland began in 1711, enabling Amsterdam to establish the first European coffee exchange. In 1721, 90 per cent of the coffee on the Amsterdam market originated in Yemen, but by 1726, 90 per cent or four million pounds of coffee a year was supplied from Java and the prices were one third that of Arabian coffee.

The French wouldn’t be left behind. In 1712, Amsterdam’s mayor sent a coffee sapling as a royal present to Louis XIV of France, and when it died, the following year the Dutch sent a stronger specimen. In what came to be known as Noble Plant, the king sent it to the Jardin du Roi in Paris, and had France’s first greenhouse built for it, which France successfully propagated to their colonies in the Caribbean. Around 1720, a French naval officer named Gabriel Mathieu de Clieu obtained a sapling from the Paris Jardin and carried the plant to the island of Martinique. The plant flourished in the climate and soils of the Caribbean and saw its first harvest in 1726. Plantings quickly spread, coffee estates multiplied, and in fifty years, just under nineteen million coffee trees were growing on the island and Martinique was already producing more coffee than Java. The French also introduced the plant to their colony of Saint Domingue, now Haiti and its success soon outstripped production everywhere else in the Caribbean. By the 1780s, 80 per cent of the world’s coffee supply came from the Caribbean, principally Saint Domingue. The Noble Tree would become the parent for nearly all of the coffee in the Americas and West Indies, and the European colonial powers rapidly made it global by planting them in the far reaches of their colonial territories.

The transformation of coffee to a globally traded and industrial product during the second half of the nineteenth century was driven by two countries in the Americas: Brazil and the US. In the United States, coffee was initially introduced by the Dutch and before long, coffee houses were opening in the colonies. The King’s Arms was the first in New York City, while Boston had Red Lion, King’s Head, and Indian Queen and William Penn introduced the brew into Delaware and Pennsylvania. Coffee consumption spread like wildfire post-independence and as the country expanded west, so did coffee. The Civil War was a pivotal event in the United States coffee history. Aware of the psychoactive effects of coffee, the Generals made sure Union troops were well supplied with coffee, a daily ration of about 43 grams and some soldiers carried grinders fitted into the butt of their rifles.

In Brazil, legend has it that, the man responsible for introduction of the plant was Francisco de Melo Palheta, a Portuguese officer. In 1727 he is supposed to have charmed the wife of governor of French Guyana into gifting him coffee seeds hidden in a bouquet of flowers and then smuggled the seeds into Brazil, which were then planted in the Pará state, marking the beginning of coffee cultivation. Coffee’s fortunes were transformed when it was introduced into the mountainous Paraiba valley region, south of Rio de Janeiro, where coffee trees took well to the terra roxa, well-drained and nutrient-rich red clay soil.

Adding to the surge in US coffee consumption was Brazil’s ability to rapidly expand coffee output by extending the coffee frontier into its hinterlands without significantly raising its prices, which further enabled the US to absorb this into its ever-expanding consumer economy. The US consumption per capita, tripled between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, as consumers moved from home roasting to purchasing pre-roasted, branded coffee products. Once Central America and Colombia began to compete for the US market, it completely revolutionized coffee consumption in America and then the world.

Final Words

I am not a coffee drinker and having grown-up in Hyderabad, India, my favourite morning drink and a few times during the day is Chai or Tea made with milk. For my generation and many before me, significant part of our college days was spent in Irani Café’s that served their unique variety of Chai. They were an indispensable feature of the social milieu, albeit male dominated. Today, a few decades later, while Irani Chai is as popular as ever, Irani Café’s that multiple generations knew as an integral part of their life, have all but disappeared. They don’t define the socializing aspect of Hyderabad anymore and have completely been replaced by, you guessed it right – Coffee Shops: Chains, Boutiques and Artisanal. Personally, it took me time to grasp this change and put this in the context of coffee culture that has been conquering the world for the past five hundred years.

But this has been an irreversible trend, and it is poised to accelerate as newer converts get access to newer types of blends and custom brews. This is the other part of the story that I have not covered, how coffee got commercialized and came to be seen as a cultural icon, from Starbucks to Artisanal brands like Araku. Writing about it is a different beast altogether and hopefully I will someday!!