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The Spread of Coffee
-Europe
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 Moslem 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 English became acquainted with coffee in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centurirs 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 came to France through the efforts of merchants in Marseilles, who began drinking coffee in Levant, and decided that they must import it. The winemakers and doctors fought the spread of coffee; winemakers feared that it would reduce 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, who held lavish parties featuring the exotic beverage, introduced Louis XIV to it.

In the late seventeenth century 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, eventually to Brazil, and then to other parts of Latin America.

-America
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.

In 1689 the London Coffee house became Boston's first coffee house, and The Green Dragon, which was founded in 1697, became the "headquarters of the revolution". It was here, in 1773, that the Boston Tea Party was planned, which practically overnight resulted in coffee becoming the dominant hot beverage in America. French and Dutch merchants supplied the tea boycotting colonists with coffee. Later, American merchants returned home with cargoes of coffee from Martinique, Puerto Rico, and Haiti. As European coffee drinkers colonized America during the nineteenth century, the demand for coffee grew. Coffee then moved westward with the frontier, where settlers, scouts, and soldiers liked their brew "hot, black, and strong enough to walk by itself." 1

Unfortunately, coffee in America suffered for many reasons. In Europe, the passion for good tasting coffee was maintained. In the US, due possibly to a smaller initial population, small roasters were not able to survive. Coffee was also often roasted at home, which produced an inconsistent product at best, made the idea of large commercial roasters appealing. With their large volume and the margin between the green and roasted product, they were able to survive. Finally, with the advent of vacuum packaging and modern transportation, it became possible for a roaster on one side of the country to sell to a retailer on the other side. As with many other foods, coffee suffered when America began to fall in love with technology.

1. The Book of Coffee & Tea, Joel, David, & Karl Schapira, St. Martin's Press, 1991

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