Early Coffee Growing And Consumption

One thing is for certain – cultivation of coffee DID begin in Ethiopia and was then spread by the Arabic  world as it expanded rapidly around 1100 AD. From the Arabic world. Coffee was traded into Europe and India. The very first consumption of coffee was in solid form – grinding beans into a paste with fat and eating it. This may well have made sense before someone happily discovered that the right amount of roasting dramatically improved the flavor of coffee without seriously removing the effects. Another popular use for coffee was apparently a wine fermented from coffee pulp made by grinding the whole berry (outside pulp and internal bean together).

Coffee roasting and brewing apparently began about the same time as cultivation – probably one was directly related to the other.

Coffee roasting and brewing were immediately taken up with enthusiasm in the Arabic cultures – with Yemen leading the way. It is known that the consumption of coffee as a drink was widespread in the Arabic world from the Mediterranean to India by the second half of the 1200s. The Yemenese coffee growers recognized that they had a valuable commodity on their hands and tried to keep unroasted or dried coffee out of foreign hands – apparently with such success that coffee was not cultivated outside of the Arabian Peninsula or Eastern Africa until the 1600s.

Roasted or dried (green) coffee was, however, enthusiasticly exported to neighbouring countries and the first record of a coffeeshop – the ancester of both the Paris Cafe and the ubiquitous Starbucks – was in Constantinople (now Istanbul) in 1475. It was called Kiv Hana.

Kiv Hana was apparently very successful and within about 50 years there were hundreds of coffee houses in the city. It is also clear that the culture of the coffee house, the coffee shop, the cafe, whatever you call it, was started here. People came to talk, play chess, read, listen to music and gossip. In other words, nothing has changed in 600 years! It is important to note that then, as now, Constantinople was a cultural bridge between the Arabic and Western world. And from Constantinople the coffeeshop made its way to Venice. In the late 1500s ambassadors from Venice to Constantinople talked about public meetings in businesses where a dark, hot liquid was served. Coffee itself arrived in Venice almost immediately and the first Italian coffee houses opened in the mid 1600s.

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