History of Coffee

Almost everyone loves coffee and recently, with the growth of coffee houses, many people want to know the history of coffee. The word caffe is of Italian origin and was used in the late 16th century. No one really knows where the word coffee came from, but it is possible it came from the caffe drink in Italy or the Kaffa region of Ethiopia where the plant originally was found. The Ethiopians noticed that by grounding up the coffee beans, they had a burst of energy. By 1000 A.D. Arabs began boiling the beans, thus making the first coffee drink in the history of coffee.

The love of coffee spread throughout the world until the first coffee house was opened in Istanbul in 1554. By the late 1600s, there were more than 3,000 coffee houses located in England; however, they did not allow women to enter. The first coffee houses appeared in France at the end of the 17th century as well.

Coffee made its way to America in the 1700s. The history of coffee and the history of the emerging colonized states were forever entwined when the Continental Congress declared coffee the national drink in protest of the tax placed on tea by the British. After the Boston Tea Party, many patriots replaced tea with coffee as their drink of choice.

It is believed that the Dutch brought the coffee plant to Central and South America. Even today, it remains one of their main cash crops. In 1825, the history of coffee became important to the US when coffee plants were first introduced to the Hawaiian Islands, the only US state that produces coffee. Today, coffee is a very valuable commodity often traded through the world with millions of people enjoying it daily. Although it seems like a very simple product, the export of coffee can account for as much as 80% of some of the world’s most underdeveloped countries.