The History of Coffee
Coffee was first recorded used as a food and medicine as early as the 6th century A.D.  
(Coffee is an Herb.)

It is said that the discovery of coffee dates back to 800 A.D. It is said that an Ethiopian (some accounts ready Yemeni) goatherd noticed his goats frolicking merrily after eating some berries from a bush. He ate the same berries, and found himself energized. This account shows up in every history of coffee, but is probably apocryphal: archaeologists have established that Ethiopians were eating coffee berries thousands of years ago.

For centuries, Africans ate the beans raw. Commonly, they ground green beans, mixed them with animal fat, and rolled them into small balls to eat as needed for energy, such as while traveling. Coffee was cultivated on, and traded from the Arabian peninsula perhaps as early as 800 A.D., and it appears the Turks were the first to use it widely to make beverages, sometimes adding spices. The first coffee shop opened in Constantinople around 1475.

Arabs began formally cultivating the bean in the high regions of Ethiopia, where the shrubs that bear coffee berries are native. It is unclear as to how the process of deriving roasted coffee beans came from the picking of fruit, since the process involved of taking the seeds from the red berries is complex now and probably developed over time.

One of the lessons to be learned from coffee is the effectiveness of outlawing victimless vices (coffee being considered a vice arbitrarily; it’s a pretty benign addiction.) In Constantinople, so many coffee shops opened that the clergy began complaining that they had more customers than the churches. The Ottoman Sultan tried to outlaw coffee in Turkey in 1543 and by 1554 the coffee business was booming in Turkey. During this time Turkish homes employed full-time coffee stewards. Supply and demand exploded, perhaps because the ban could only have made business immensely more profitable. (The Scots occasionally tried to ban golf, too but we now know Scotland as the birthplace of golf as an organized sport, though evidence shows it might have originated as a pastime in Denmark.)

Seeds were smuggled to India, probably by Muslims returning from pilgrimage to Mecca. From there, Dutch traders took them to Ceylon and later the East Indies. It is believed that coffee plants made their way to the Americas through a single Indonesian plant that was raised by King Louis XIV.

Over the centuries the resourcefulness and persistence of the entrepreneur has spread the enjoyment of coffee around the globe. By 1750, coffee had reached most of the places in the Americas where it is cultivated today. There were brief experiments in lowlands in Brazil where coffee grew poorly, but by the time it was known the high altitudes worked better, it was a profitable business for everyone cultivating it in the Americas. By this time, coffee was being sold across Europe, and was being cultivated in India and Java. The first trader to take it to India had to smuggle it out of Arabia – another case of a government’s restrictions failing to work as intended. Even taxes were implicated: Coffee was declared America’s national beverage in 1773, in conjunction with the Boston Tea Party.

The history of coffee has come a long way from eating raw beans, roasting and grinding from as early as 500 A.D.; filtering and adding spices in the 1600s; vacuum-packing in tin cans in 1900; instant coffee in 1901. The home coffee maker was born after WWII, but wasn’t until the 1970s that it was developed to the point that it was viable on the market. Since canning and processing tend to reduce quality, over the last couple of decades the luxury trend has been toward local roasting and grinding your own beans at home. In 1900, it was a luxury to prepare it at home without going to all that trouble. Today, people who can taste the difference believe it’s worth going backwards in convenience.”

The history of coffee appears to be more peaceful than the history of many other commodities such as oil, iron, gold, and Irish potatoes. The history of tea has a little more violence because of government involvement. But for both coffee and tea, you can be assured that private individuals and corporations are responsible for the fact that you can enjoy either one affordably, conveniently, in abundant variety and high quality, anytime, anywhere.

PriceCostco Connection, February 1995 “Hot Coffee!” Brad Edmonds www.lewrockwell.com/edmonds, 
October 23, 2002