It was once upon a time in the Kingdom of Kaffa, today’s Ethiopia,
when the Abyssinian shepherd Kaldi noticed that his goats did not rest at night after the consumption of the red coffee cherries.
Coffee was mentioned here already in the 9th century.
Arabia
- From Ethiopia the coffee probably came to Arabia in the 14th century by slave traders.
- From a famous Arabic manuscript of Abd al-Kafir from the year 1587, coffee consumption is reported.
- Another contemporary report is interpreted as saying that the Sheikh Gemaleddin, Mufti of Aden, had cultivated coffee cultures in Yemen in 1454, for which Arabica seeds had been taken from the Abyssinian mountains.
- Via Mecca and Medina, coffee came to Cairo in 1510 by traveling pilgrims.
- Around 1511 the first coffee houses were built in Mecca.
- In 1517 Sultan Selim I had incorporated Syria, Yemen, and Egypt.
- From the southern Yemeni port of Mocha (today’s al-Mukha) and Jiddah, Mecca’s previous port, coffee cultivation spread over 4 continents.
- In 1530/32 the first coffee houses in Damascus and Aleppo were opened in Syria.
- 1554 the first coffee house on European ground in Constantinople.
Europe
- In 1645 a cafe was opened in Venice.
- 1650 followed Oxford, 1652 London, 1659 Marseille, 1663 Amsterdam and The Hague. In 1672 the Parisians also had their first cafe.
- In 1673, there was the first coffee house on German ground in Bremen, followed in 1677 in Hamburg, Berlin in 1721.
- 1683 In front of Vienna, the Turks were defeated. Franz Georg Kolschitzky, who had acquired great services around the city during the siege of Vienna by the Turks, received as a present the leftover coffee and the permission to dispense coffee.
Asia
- The first planting outside of Africa and Arabia took place in Ceylon in 1648 by the Dutch.
- From 1696 on Java, Sumatra, Bali, Timor and Celebes. The plants used there originated from Arabia.
- By 1715, the French succeeded in growing the first coffee on La Réunion.
- In the Philippines, the Spaniards imported 1740 coffee plants.
America
- In 1718, the govonor of Batavia (Djakarta) brought coffee seeds to Dutch Guiana (Surinam).
- The French navy officer De Clieu brought coffee trees from the Jardin des Plantes in Paris to Martinique in 1723.
- The Typica plants were brought from 1710 as a war reparation from Amsterdam to Paris.
- They came from a plant imported from Java in 1706.
- In 1726 came the first coffee plants of Surinam or Martinique to Brazil.
- In 1875, Guatemala became a coffee country through the Spaniards.
- Here, as everywhere in the Latin American plantation industry, African slaves had to work.
People’s drink in Europe
- In 1750, 600,000 bags of coffee were produced worldwide.
- In 1769, the first chicory coffee factory started operating on German ground in Braunschweig.
- The “false mocha”, “mocca faux” (“Muckefuck” probably a derivation) dates from that time.
- In 1766 Frederick the Great declared the coffee import trade as a state monopoly.
- From 1780, coffee could only be roasted in royal roasters (coffee-burning compulsion).
- 1850 coffee is finally a people’s drink. The wealthy citizen enjoys it in the morning and in the afternoon.
- From the poorer classes, coffee was used as a kind of universal meal to dampen hunger. Stretching the expensive coffee with chicory was still common.
- Meanwhile, 4 million bags of coffee are produced every year.
Australia
- In 1896 the coffee finally reached the fifth continent and in Queensland first coffee plantations were created.
Congo
- In 1898, Robusta coffee is discovered in the Congo in Africa.
- In the 19th / 20th century coffee is re-cultivated in many African countries by the European colonialists.
20th Century
- After the end of the 2nd World War, coffee in Germany became a symbol of reconstruction and economic miracle.
- The global increase in demand and the loss of crops in Brazil due to long-lasting drought and subsequent frost of the 1950s caused the price of green coffee to skyrocket in 1953.
- The following increased production of coffee in the world led to a massive overproduction, which drove the market price dramatically into the depths and brought many cultivators into economic as well as political difficulties.
- The International Coffee Agreement (ICA) was concluded by ICO in 1962 with the aim of achieving a balance between supply and demand in the long term.
- In 2000 104 million bags of coffee are produced.
- In 2001, the coffee world market price collapsed again due to an oversupply. it caused hunger crises, many coffee farmers were impoverished and child labor increased.
- Only in 2006 did the situation on the world coffee market calmed down as a result of demand from emerging markets such as China.
- Coffee is today the second most important good after petroleum!