Early History
Without it many people cannot wake up and stay awake all day. Hot,
cold, black, white, latte, or cappuccino, all mean the same thing, coffee. It
has become a more popular drink than water.
Coffee shops, like Starbucks, Costa and Café du Roi, are all over the
world. Actually, there are more than 400
million cups drunk each year.
(http://www.essortment.com/history-coffee-41731.html)
However, the early history of this famous drink is not clear. A legend said that the first coffee plant was
found in Ethiopia. A goat farmer said that his goats were very wild after
eating a berry. Religious leaders took
that berry (the coffee berry) and made a drink of it. After they drank the drink they stayed awake
all night to pray. From Ethiopia, the
coffee berry made it to Arabia where coffee, the drink we know today, got born.
Travelling from Mecca and Medina, coffee spread to Egypt, Persia (Iran) and
Syria. And during periods of Muslim
expansion between the 11th and 16th centuries, coffee appeared in Turkey, the
Balkans, Spain, and North Africa.
(http://chilipaper.com/FNCC/history_of_coffee.htm)
Bibliography
Development
By the 1600s coffee spread to Europe beginning in Venice, then
spreading to Austria, France, Germany, and Holland. In 1652, the first coffee house was opened in
England. (http://www.essortment.com/history-coffee-41731.html) Coffee houses popular everywhere because men
loved going there to smoke tobacco, and play chess. Soon after, coffee spread to America. All over the world people were drinking
coffee just like the Arabs in the Middle East. So coffee made too much money
for the Arabs. The Arabs wanted to keep safe the coffee so they guarded the
coffee trade. Foreigners could not visit
coffee farms, and no one could take a coffee plant to another country.
(http://chilipaper.com/FNCC/history_of_coffee.htm) However, plants did make it out of Arabia;
plants traveled to Java, Indonesia, Central, and South America.
(http://www.ico.org/coffee_story.asp)
Coffee was now everywhere and everyone
drinking it. The problem was that too many people were growing coffee. When was are too many growers of coffee, the
prices go down. This means small farmers
can’t survive with no money. In this
time, the coffee growers in America, Guatemala, Mexico, El Salvador and
Colombia, grew fast. Also as the United
States became a big country, the demand for coffee grew at the same time.
(http://www.ico.org/coffee_story.asp)
Today
The coffee culture in the USA grew faster
and became the leader developing the taste for coffee. From the 1970s, coffee
houses like Starbucks and Seattle’s Best grew very fast. These and other coffee shops moved all over
Europe in places like Italy, Germany and Scandinavia. They are now found in
every country in the world. We can find
these shops in all cities like, London, Tokyo, Dubai and Bangkok.
Today, coffee farms are all over the
world. Central and South America produce
more coffee than any other area and Brazil is the coffee capital of the world.
(http://www.essortment.com/history-coffee-41731.html) Coffee is the world's
most popular beverage. We consume 400 billion cups each year, nearly 400
million cups a day. (http://www.gocoffeego.com/professor-peaberry/history-of-coffee/1900)
The importance of coffee to the world is proved by it being second in value
only to oil as a source of foreign exchange to producing countries.
(http://www.ico.org/coffee_story.asp) So
the coffee berry that the Ethiopians found the goats eating has changed into
something very different. The Arabic way
of boiling the bean to make a drink changed in many ways. However, the coffee we drink today is still
the same drink they had in Mecca. So we
should all thank the Arabs for creating coffee, the drink, and the Americans
for making it better and spreading it around the world.
Bibliography
