Successful Eagle

Coffee use can be traced at least to as early as the 9th century, when it appeared in the highlands of Ethiopia.^[1] According to legend, Ethiopian shepherds were the first to observe the influence of the caffeine in coffee beans when the goats appeared to “dance” and to have an increased level of energy after consuming wild coffee berries.^[12] The legend names the shepherd “Kaldi.” From Ethiopia, coffee spread to Egypt and Yemen.^[13] It was in Arabia that coffee beans were first roasted and brewed similarly as they are today. By the 15th century, it had reached the rest of the Middle East, Persia, Turkey, and northern Africa.

In 1583, Leonhard Rauwolf, a German physician, gave this description of coffee after returning from a ten year trip to the Near East:^[14]

From the Muslim world, coffee spread to Italy. The thriving trade between Venice and North Africa, Egypt, and the Middle East brought many goods, including coffee, to the Venetian port. From Venice, it was introduced to the rest of Europe. Coffee became more widely accepted after it was deemed a Christian beverage by Pope Clement VIII in 1600, despite appeals to ban the “Muslim drink”. The first European coffee house opened in Italy in 1645.^[2] The Dutch were the first to import coffee on a large scale, and they were among the first to defy the Arab prohibition on the exportation of plants or unroasted seeds when Pieter van den Broeck smuggled seedlings from Aden into Europe in 1616.^[15] The Dutch later grew the crop in Java and Ceylon.^[16] Through the efforts of the British East India Company, coffee became popular in England as well. It was introduced in France in 1657, and in Austria and Poland after the 1683 Battle of Vienna, when coffee was captured from supplies of the defeated Turks.^[17]

When coffee reached North America during the colonial period, it was initially not as successful as it had been in Europe. During the Revolutionary War, however, the demand for coffee increased so much that dealers had to hoard their scarce supplies and raise prices dramatically; this was partly due to the reduced availability of tea from British merchants.^[18] After the War of 1812, during which Britain temporarily cut off access to tea imports, the Americans’ taste for coffee grew, and high demand during the American Civil War together with advances in brewing technology secured the position of coffee as an everyday commodity in the United States.^[19]

Noted as one of the world’s largest, most valuable, legally traded commodities after oil, coffee has become a vital cash crop for many Third World countries. Over one hundred million people in developing countries have become dependent on coffee as the primary source of income (Ponte 1). Coffee has become the primary export and backbone for African countries like Uganda, Burundi, Rwanda, and Ethiopia^[20] as well as other Central American countries (1)

Tags: coffee