Product Search
Coffees & Cherries
Coffee trees produce berries that are called coffee cherries.
The cherries are bright red when they’re ready for harvesting.
The beans are seeds within the cherry.
Learn more about cultivating coffee.
A Goat and a King: Coffee’s Colorful History
There are many picturesque legends surrounding the discovery of coffee.
Probably the best known is that of Kaldi and his goats. As the story goes an Ethiopian goat
herder named Kaldi noticed his goats were particularly active after eating the fruit of a
certain tree. Even the oldest goats were dancing and frolicking like kids. Kaldi helped himself
and ate some of the fruit. He was amazed at the sense of well-being and alertness that resulted.
A while later a wandering imam came upon Kaldi and noticed his unusual behavior. Kaldi shared his
secret with the holy man who refined the process by drying the fruit and then boiling it.
The resulting drink was used to stay awake during nightlong religious ceremonies.
Coffee's Trek Across the World
Until late in the 17th century coffee remained in East Africa both as a cultivar and as a beverage.
Eventually beans from Mecca were smuggled into India. Dutch spies finally succeeded in stealing plants from
Arabia and cultivated them in Java (this gave the Western world its first informal name for coffee).
The Dutch distributed plants all over Europe from their botanical gardens in Holland. The fruit of one of these plants,
which grew in the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, became the progenitor for all the coffee plants in Latin America.
A French naval officer, Gabriel Mathieu de Clieu, brought a few seedlings from this plant to Martinique.
Coffee eventually spread throughout the West Indies, Brazil and other regions of Latin America.
Coffeehouses...from Mecca to Marseilles
The first coffee houses or qaveh khaneh were established in 16th century Mecca. However, rulers deemed them a threat
due to the social and political discussions that took place in the cafes. The government, aided by clerics and physicians
(who wanted to sell coffee as an expensive medicine), tried repeatedly and unsuccessfully to close them down.
Eventually the government realized that coffee houses were profit centers and could provide tax revenue to the community!
The cafés of Damascus and Constantinople were the beginning of what we know as the modern café. These were comfortable places
designed to provide a welcome refuge from the desert. Friends met to talk and play games such as backgammon and chess. It is also
said that the game of bridge originated in cafés in Constantinople.
The merchant fleets of Venice were probably the first Europeans to learn about coffee. Eventually the beverage came to Rome,
where fanatical priests tried to have it banned on the basis that it must have been created by the Devil since it was a Muslim drink.
Pope Clement VIII tried coffee in an effort to resolve the matter, and blessed it on the spot. Coffee soon became an
important part of Italian life and the first European coffee houses opened.
The British became acquainted with coffee around the turn of the 17th century when English seamen described coffee in travel
books and told of drinking coffee in Turkey and Egypt. Coffee eventually became a favorite of students at Oxford and
soon spread throughout Great Britain.
Coffee arrived in France through the efforts of merchants in Marseilles who began drinking it in Levant and decided to import it.
There were obstacles though: winemakers and doctors fought the influx of coffee. Winemakers feared that it would threaten their profits
and the doctors, again, wanted to sell it as an expensive medicine. The drink’s popularity was ensured when the ambassador of Turkey
served it to Louis XIV at a lavish party.
North America’s First Cup
Coffee was probably introduced to North America by Captain John Smith when he founded the colony of Virginia. Smith knew of coffee
from his travels in Turkey.
Coffee gained its first popularity in North America in New Amsterdam (now New York). By the time the British gained control in 1664,
coffee had replaced ale as the city’s most popular breakfast drink.
The Green Dragon, a Boston cafe, became the headquarters of the American Revolution. It was here that the Boston Tea Party was planned,
which, nearly overnight, resulted in coffee becoming the dominant hot beverage in America. French and Dutch merchants supplied the
tea-boycotting colonists with coffee. As European coffee drinkers colonized America during the nineteenth century, the demand for
coffee grew. Coffee then moved westward with frontier settlers, scouts and soldiers.
Americans Demand Better Coffee
In Europe, the passion for good tasting coffee was maintained but, in American, the quality of coffee suffered for many reasons.
In the earlier days, small roasters were unable to survive in the marketplace due to low demand. As a result, coffee was often purchased raw or 'green', then roasted
at home which produced an inconsistent product and prompted the rise of the large American commercial roasters. With their huge volume
and the margin between the low quality green and roasted product, these roasters were able to compete and survive.
It wasn’t until the 1960's that high-quality coffee began appearing in the United States. Alfred Peet, a native of Netherland and the
son of a small coffee roaster, settled in California and opened three small cafes, serving high quality coffee. Peet became known as
"The Dutchman who taught America how to drink coffee". Peet taught the craft of sourcing and roasting to others and thus began the spread of high quality coffee in America.