There's NO Excuse For Bad Coffee!!!
The History of Coffee
So, how did this wonderful elixir we all know and love come to be? We do not know how long the coffee plant has been around, but people have been drinking coffee in one form or another for a thousand years.
 
The coffee plant itself is native to the present-day nation of Ethiopia in East Africa. It also flourished across the Red Sea in the Arabian Peninsula, where it was first served as a hot beverage sometime by the 11th century. One legend has it that a goat herd named Kaldi noticed that his goats were frolicking more than usual after they ate some red berries. He tried them, felt invigorated, and shared his discovery with others.
 
The Arabs were the first to cultivate coffee, and the Yemen port of Mocha on the Arabian Peninsula was for many centuries the primary shipping origin for coffee. Coffee was soon planted in India, after a pilgrim to Mecca absconded with some seedlings.
 
It was when the Turks conquered Constantinople in 1453 that they introduced coffee to this international city. Italian traders soon brought the drink with them in their travels to the rest of Europe, and by the mid-17th century, there were coffeehouses from Rome to Paris to London. During this time, Viennese coffee lovers further refined the drink by filtering out the grounds and adding sugar and milk.
 
In England, coffeehouses became gathering places for all classes, and the literate would read the news of the day to the illiterate. Due to this sharing of ideas, these coffeehouses were dubbed “penny universities,” as it cost a penny to enter the coffeehouse.
 
The Dutch, who were a dominant influence in international shipping in the 17th and early 18th centuries, began to cultivate coffee in their colonies in the Indonesian islands of Java and Sumatra. Soon, “Mocha-Java” became the world’s first great blend, as African and Indonesian coffees were married in a delicious combination.
 
Because of the success of the Dutch, Amsterdam became a center of the coffee trade in the 18th century, and in 1713, a coffee plant was sent as a present to the King of France, Louis XIV. The plant was housed in the royal garden, where it was guarded. This single plant is the progenitor of every plant in the western hemisphere, and is also the genesis of a story of illicit love, intrigue and obsession.
 
In 1720, a French naval officer named Gabriel Mathieu de Clieu was in Paris on leave from Martinique,
a French colony in the Caribbean. Knowing that Martinique’s tropical climate would be perfect for coffee, he requested clippings from his King's tree, but his request was denied.
 
Being the resourceful and determined man that he was, de Clieu resorted to theft, and managed to steal
a seedling from the botanical garden. He then set sail for Martinique with the plant safely ensconced in a glass case. But on the return journey, the ship was almost attacked by pirates, someone tried to steal the plant, damaging it in the process, and the ship suffered by turns a violent storm and becalmed seas.
Water became scarce, and the tree was kept alive only because de Clieu shared his water rations with his precious cargo. Finally, the ship arrived in Martinique and the coffee tree was re-planted and placed under guard. It grew, and multiplied, and by 1777, there were 18 million coffee trees on Martinique. Eventually 90 percent of the world's coffee spreads from this plant.
 
While the Dutch had already planted some coffee trees in their colony of Suriname, both the Dutch and
the French jealously guarded their coffee hegemony in the new world. The emperor of Brazil, however, wanted in on the action, so in 1727, he sent Lt. Col. Francisco de Melo Palheta to French Guiana to mediate a border dispute between the French and Dutch. Little did the French and Dutch suspect, but
not only did the Colonel settle the dispute, he also managed to initiate an illicit liaison with the French governor's wife. Before he returned to Brazil, she presented him with secret coffee cuttings and seeds.
It was from these cultivars that the world's greatest coffee empire emerged.
 
In the future United States of America, the Boston Tea Party Of 1773 was planned in a coffee house named the Green Dragon. In response to the British tax on tea, a group of colonists took over three English ships in the port in Boston and threw their cargo of tea into the harbor. In protest, many of the colonists in America switched from drinking tea to drinking coffee. Coffee became a national drink in the U.S., and by 1900, American coffee importers had learned to pack coffee in vacuum tins, extending shelf life, but putting many small roasters out of business. Coffee’s status as the premier beverage in this country was established during Prohibition in the 1920’s.
 
Meanwhile, in Europe, a machine was invented in France in the 1920’s that extracted more flavor from coffee by using pressurized water, but it was not perfected until 1948, when Achille Gaggia invented the espresso machine in Italy.
 
Today, coffee is one of the world’s largest traded commodities, in some years second only to oil, and it is enjoyed by hundreds of millions of people every day. Could Kaldi or de Clieu ever have imagined that?