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.
