A Brief Look At Coffee
In order to start your day off productively, what is that one thing you always drink a cup of? If it’s not tea or vodka, then you’re probably going with coffee! The morning cup of coffee is a humble daily ritual for millions of Americans and people across the globe, but for how long has this caffeine-rich beverage been on the menu in human history? Today we will be discussing the origins of coffee, a drink that has become so popular it would be just as regular to Viennese urbanites and Islamic scholars in the 1700s to the everyday older folks at your local coffee shop.
If we were to trace the origins of coffee back to its beginnings, we would find ourselves in Ethiopia. Ethiopian Coffee is the oldest in the world, and the place from which coffee was first consumed and then exported. Initially, the preparation of coffee did not involve grinding up the “beans” of the coffee plant and then mixing the powder with hot water. Instead, the berries (coffee “beans” are actually berries, believe it or not) were just chewed directly without any preparation. One of many legends about the discovery of coffee is that of Kaldi, an Arab goatherd who was puzzled by the strange antics of his flock. Around roughly 850 AD Kaldi supposedly sampled the berries of the evergreen bush on which the goats were feeding and, on experiencing a sense of exhilaration, proclaimed his discovery to the world. Even without drinking it, chewing the beans was enough to create the famous stimulant effect associated with caffeine. From Ethiopia the use of coffee beans spread to Yemen and later on the rest of the Middle East, where Islamic countries would adopt coffee as a culturally and interestingly enough, politically relevant institution.
The first coffeehouses as we know them today appeared in the Ottoman Empire in Constantinople and also in Mecca in the 15th century. During this time, alcoholic beverages had been banned by religious authorities in much of the Islamic world, and the void that was left by the removal of alcohol was rapidly filled back up by this new caffeinated beverage. These Islamic Coffeehouses developed from simple meeting places where friends and strangers can mingle and enjoy a cup of coffee together, to places where politically and religiously revolutionary ideas were flung around. This idea of the coffeehouse as a place for candor-filled discussions of social issues is something that we can find relevant to this day.
After the 1683 Battle of Vienna, where the Ottoman Empire was defeated by an alliance of Christian European nations, the victorious European troops were introduced to coffee. Many of them had never seen this beverage before, and after raiding the supplies left behind by retreating Ottoman soldiers, they found large amounts of ground coffee and beans which they assumed to be of no value. Therefore, the soldiers then began to burn all the coffee in fires, but when that wonderful familiar aroma we know today began wafting through the air the soldiers knew they had actually found something of great value. Coffee was something that Europeans would soon find in hot demand, and was an economic powerhouse. While the production of Coffee was limited mainly to Ethiopia and Yemen historically, in the late 1800s and during the 1900s coffee production began to swell across the planet. Today, the majority of the world's coffee comes from a variety of different places. Brazil is the world's primary producer, with 40% of the world’s coffee produced originating from that nation, with Vietnam producing a solid 20% of that and Columbia in third place.
Now if that is where most of the coffee is produced, where is most of the coffee in the world being consumed? In pounds per capita per year, the breakdown for the top five countries goes like this; Finland: (26.5 lbs) Norway: (21.8 lbs) Iceland: (19.8 lbs) Denmark: (19.18 lbs) Netherlands: (18.5 lbs). For comparison, in America the average pounds per capita per year coffee consumption is only 9.7 lbs, which comes to roughly 3 cups a day. All in all, that’s pretty crazy how a country as productive as the United States doesn’t actually consume all that much caffeine compared to much smaller countries such as those Scandinavian nations mentioned above. All in all, this has been a brief look at coffee and I wish you all a happy national coffee day!
References
https://www.britannica.com/topic/coffee
https://www.nationsonline.org/oneworld/map/ethiopia-political-map.htm
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7b/Depiction_of_an_Ottoman_Coffeehouse.jpg
https://www.statista.com/statistics/277137/world-coffee-production-by-leading-countries/
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/coffee-consumption-by-country
