The History of Coffee

ca. 600–1000 For a quick pick-me-up, the Galla tribe of Ethiopia eats balls of crushed raw coffee beans mixed with fruit and animal fat.

1455 According to Turkish law, a woman who does not get her daily quota of coffee from her husband has grounds for divorce, instead.

1600 Pope Clement VIII supposedly baptizes coffee, making it fit for Christians to drink, rather than condemning it as an infidel threat, as his advisers recommend.

1607 While some claim that it has already come to Canada, Captain John Smith, founder of the colony of Virginia at Jamestown, is credited with introducing coffee to North America.

1610 British poet Sir George Sandys notes that the Turks sit “chatting most of the day” over their coffee, which is “blacke as soote, and tasting not much unlike it.”

1652 The first of many coffeehouses in England opens. Called “penny universities,” men gather to share news and gossip over one-cent cups of coffee. To be sure they’re waited on, patrons toss coins into boxes marked “To Insure Prompt Service”—the original “TIPS.”

1669 Soliman Aga, Turkish ambassador to France, gives elaborate parties, inspiring a craze in all things Turkish and inducing the upper classes to loll around in dressing gowns drinking coffee.

1670 Dorothy Jones of Boston becomes the first licensed coffee trader in America.

1674 In London, where women are not allowed in coffeehouses, the Women’s Petition Against Coffee complains that “the Excessive Use of that Newfangled, Abominable, Heathenish Liquor called Coffee . . . has . . . Eunucht our Husbands, and Crippled our more kind gallants.”

1675 In Vienna, Franz Georg Kolschitzky recognizes piles of mysterious “dry black fodder” left by fleeing Turkish troops as coffee beans. He claims the abandoned sacks and sets up central Europe’s first coffeehouse.

1687/88 In London, ship owners and maritime insurance brokers gather to do business at Edward Lloyd’s Coffee House—which ultimately becomes the now-famous Lloyd’s of London, the largest insurance brokerage in the world.

ca. 1700 Coffee and tea begin to sober alcohol-soaked Europe and America, where beer has been the breakfast of choice.

1714 The world’s first modern style greenhouse is built to protect a single delicate coffee plant given as a gift to Louis XIV of France. Lovingly tended, it becomes the parent stock of most of the coffee grown in Latin America today.

1732 Bach’s “Coffee Cantata” premieres at Zimmerman’s Coffee House in Leipzig. The operetta tells of a fashionable girl who insists on drinking coffee despite her father’s objections. “If I can’t drink my bowl of coffee three times a day,” she sings, “then in my torment I will shrivel like a piece of roast goat.”

ca. 1750 In Europe, handles become popular and are added to traditional drinking bowls, creating a more practical vessel.

1777 Alarmed, Frederick the Great of Germany writes: "It is disgusting to notice the increase in the quantity of coffee used by my subjects, and the like amount of money that goes out of the country in consequence. My people must drink beer.”

1791 The only major successful slave revolt in history takes place when slaves rise up against harsh conditions on coffee plantations in Haiti.

1823 As war looms between France and Spain, European coffee buyers glut the market, fearing shipping lanes will close. When no war materializes, many commit suicide, ruined by the miscalculation.

ca. 1830 French writer Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) consumes crushed coffee beans mixed with a bit of water and writes: “Everything becomes agitated. Ideas quick march into motion . . . for the nightly labor begins and ends with torrents of this black water.”

ca. 1861–1865 Coffee is so important to U.S. Civil War soldiers that some guns (Sharps carbines) are designed to hold coffee grinders in their buttstocks.

1865 “The Indians had come to sell us fresh meat. Father traded them sugar and coffee. It was hard for the Indians to get these things and they were crazy for them.” —Watkins family narrative, the only known account of the Crow Wagon Train near Fort Laramie, Wyoming

1881 Austin and Reuben Hills buy a retail coffee shop in San Francisco, beginning the Hills Brothers coffee empire. By 1900, they lead the industry by packing their product in newfangled vacuum cans, making it possible to buy coffee at grocery stores instead of going to neighborhood roasters.

1899 Brothers Max, Mannie, and Eddie join forces to form M. J. Brandenstein & Co., selling tea, coffee, and spices in San Francisco. The firm soon becomes famous for its coffee, and changes its name to MJB to minimize sibling rivalry and disguise the family’s German-Jewish roots.

1901 In Chicago, Japanese-American chemist Satori Kato invents the first soluble "instant coffee.”

1903 German coffee importer Ludwig Roselius gives a batch of ruined coffee beans to researchers who develop the first effective decaffeination process and create the first decaf, called “Sanka.”

1920 Coffee sales soar in the U.S. as Prohibition goes into effect.

1946 In Italy, Achilles Gaggia perfects his machine for making cappuccino (espresso topped with steamed milk or cream), named for its color, which is similar to a Capuchin friar’s habit.

1952 A Pan American Coffee Bureau marketing campaign popularizes the notion of having “coffee breaks.”

1969 The Sherri Cup Company introduces a paper coffee cup with a Greek “amphora” design. The blue and white cup becomes so much a symbol of life in New York City that its image ultimately decorates the cover of the Manhattan phone book, along with a picture of a bagel.

1969 Struggling young actor Carlos Sanchez dons fake moustache, sombrero, and poncho, befriends a mule named Lana, and takes the part of fictional coffee farmer Juan Valdez (first played by New Yorker Jose Duval), making “100 percent Colombian coffee” famous around the world.

1991–2001 In an effort to avoid fruitless trips to get coffee, computer geeks at Cambridge University in England write a computer program that captures successive images of the now-famous “Trojan Room coffeepot,” creating the first Webcam in Internet history and the most famous coffeepot in the world.

2001 Tea is the most popular drink on the planet, but Americans prefer coffee, importing more than any other country in the world.