Coffee

Coffee is a drink made from the beans of the arabica tree, a small tree that grows in tropical climates. The beans are harvested from its fruit.

The arabica tree grows wild in Ethiopia. About 1,000 years ago, monks noticed that after eating its berries, they stayed awake longer and had more energy. Other Africans made wine from the berries or mixed them with fat and ate them.

Sometime later, seeds of the tree arrived in the Arabian Peninsula, where the plants have been grown ever since. Arabians discovered how to take the beans out of the berries, roast them over high heat, grind them up, and boil them in water to make “kahweh” (coffee).

Coffee became very important to Muslim people. Their religion forbids them to drink alcohol, but they could drink coffee with their friends. By the 1300s, Arab traders and Muslims traveling to the holy shrine of Mecca were telling other Muslims about “kahweh.” Coffee made its way to Turkey in the 1500s and to Italy in the 1600s. A trader from Venice introduced it to northern Europe, where coffeehouses became very fashionable.

Coffee was not grown outside of Africa or Arabia until the late 1600s. The Arabians tried to control its production, but in 1616, some Dutch adventurers stole an arabica tree. The Dutch used it to start coffee plantations in their colonies in Indonesia and the South Pacific.

In 1723, a French naval officer managed to get a tree to Martinique, a French colony in the Caribbean. Fifty years later, coffee trees were growing throughout Central America.

In 1727, a military aide to the Emperor of Brazil snuck a tree branch out of French Guiana. By 1906, Brazil was the world’s largest coffee producer and still is.

Today, about 50 countries produce coffee for world markets.