The history of coffee

As you sit back in your comfortable chair or sip your perfectly brewed cup of coffee, have you ever wondered why it is we love this drink so much or just how much history there is to it?

Historians have argued long and hard about the history of coffee but most agree that the earliest credible evidence of either coffee drinking or the knowledge of the coffee tree appears in the middle of the 15th century in the Sufi monasteries around Mokha in Yemen.  It is said that local monks roasted coffee seeds and brewed a bitter type of coffee, much like we prepare them today. Visitors, taken by the drink, took seeds home and started the spread of the crop.

In 1670, Baba Budan smuggled coffee seeds out of the Middle East by strapping seven seeds onto his chest and took them to be planted in Mysore. Before too long coffee plants had been cultivated in places as far afield as Indonesia, Italy and the Americas.

Today Brazil tops the world’s chart for producing more coffee than any other country with Colombia coming in a close second place. More than 50 countries around the world grow coffee