From a probably invented Ethiopian goatherd to the coffee houses of Vienna, by way of religious bans, smuggled seeds and a Spanish habit that still fills supermarket shelves.
The legend of Kaldi
The version everyone knows: an Ethiopian goatherd called Kaldi noticed his goats becoming skittish after eating red berries, took them to a monastery, and the monks discovered that the infusion kept them awake through night prayers.
It's a good story and almost certainly untrue: it first appears in writing in the 17th century, some eight hundred years after the events it describes. What is documented is that coffee drinking was organised in Yemen in the 15th century, in Sufi monasteries, where it was used to stay awake during night-time rituals.
Yemen and the port of Mocha
Yemen was the first place coffee was cultivated systematically, and for nearly two centuries it held an absolute monopoly. Coffee left through the port of Mocha — hence the name we still use — and the authorities protected the trade with a simple rule: beans could be exported, but only roasted or boiled, so they couldn't germinate anywhere else.
It worked for a long time. Until it didn't.
Bans
Coffee had a contentious history from the outset. It was banned in Mecca in 1511 on the grounds that it was intoxicating; there were attempted bans in Cairo and in Istanbul, where at one point drinking it was punished severely.
The real motive was rarely the drink itself: it was the coffee houses. The qahveh khaneh had become places where people gathered to discuss politics unsupervised, and that made those in power uncomfortable. The same argument would resurface in Europe centuries later.
The smuggling that broke the monopoly
Two episodes ended Yemeni control. An Indian pilgrim, Baba Budan, is said to have smuggled seven fertile seeds out of the country in the 17th century and planted them in southern India.
And early in that same century the Dutch obtained live plants and took them to their colonies, first to Ceylon and then to Java, where they established the first large-scale colonial cultivation. A single specimen from the Amsterdam botanical garden, gifted to Louis XIV, is the ancestor of a great deal of the coffee grown in the Americas.
Almost all the coffee drunk today in the Americas descends from an astonishingly small number of plants. That genetic bottleneck is one of the reasons arabica is so vulnerable to disease.
The European coffee houses
Venice opened Europe's first coffee house around 1645, through its trading links with the Ottoman Empire. London, Paris and Vienna followed.
In England the coffee houses were nicknamed penny universities: for a penny you got coffee and access to whatever conversation was happening. Specific institutions emerged from that setting — the insurer Lloyd's began in a coffee house by the London docks. Charles II tried to close them in 1675 as seedbeds of dissent, and had to withdraw the order within days.
The plantations and their other side
In the 18th century coffee became a large-scale colonial crop in the Caribbean, Brazil and the East Indies. This is the part of the story usually passed over quickly: that expansion rested on slave labour, most of all in Brazil, which became the world's largest producer and remains so.
The price structures established then — cheap raw material at origin, value added at destination — still shape the market. It's the backdrop to certification and fair trade, which we cover in this article.
Spain and torrefacto
Spain came to coffee later than other European countries, and built its tradition on cheap coffee in a context of scarcity.
That's where torrefacto comes from: roasting with added sugar, up to 15 % of the weight of the green coffee, which caramelises and coats the bean. It caught on as a preservation method when vacuum packing didn't exist, and stayed long after it stopped making technical sense.
It explains a good deal about the Spanish coffee palate — accustomed to bitterness and very dark roasts — and it still occupies much of the supermarket shelf under the word "mezcla". If you're buying coffee in Spain, it's worth understanding: there's more in arabica versus robusta.
And up to here
The recent history is that of specialty coffee: traceability to the farm, roasting in small batches and attention to the producer. In Spain it's a young movement, and in provinces like Almería younger still, but it's no longer confined to Madrid and Barcelona.
We roast here, in small quantities. If you're interested in the local picture, we cover it in specialty coffee in Almería, and the origin of all this in the article on Ethiopia. Our coffees are in the shop.
