This book discusses the history of coffee cultivation in producing countries around the world, but it is also important to consider the growth in demand that went alongside it. Coffee is a truly global beverage, and it is common to hear the claim that it is the second most popular drink in the world after water. While there’s no evidence to support this, the ubiquity of coffee in one form or another makes it plausible.
The origins of coffee drinking are similarly vague, with very little evidence to support it. While there is some evidence of the fruit of the coffee plant being eaten in Ethiopia early on, balled up with animal fat as an invigorating trail snack, we are missing a key piece of the puzzle: we have no idea who decided to take the seed of the fruit, roast it, grind it to a powder, steep that powder in hot water and drink the resulting concoction. It’s an astonishing leap, and a mystery that will probably never be solved.
There is evidence of coffee drinking in the late 15th century, but little to back up the anecdote that the first coffee house was Kiva Han, opened in 1475 in Constantinople. If it’s true, the coffee would have been grown in Yemen, and we know that consumption did spread into the region. Coffee quickly become entwined with political and religious thought, and coffee houses were banned in Mecca in 1511 and in Cairo in 1532. In both cases, popular demand won and these bans were soon lifted.
Cafés serving Italian-style coffee were a novelty in 1950s London. With coffee enjoying a resurgence of popularity in recent years, interest in coffee shops and how to make the perfect brew has increased again.
The first coffee houses opened in Europe in the mid 1600s, and coffee soon replaced beer and wine as the breakfast drink of choice. In the New World, the popularity of coffee surged after the Boston Tea Party in 1773, when drinking coffee became a patriotic act.
COFFEE REACHES EUROPE AND BEYOND
Coffee drinking wouldn’t spread to Europe until the 1600s and coffee consumption, for medicinal purposes rather than for pleasure, predates coffee houses in Europe. Coffee would have been traded through Venice in the early 1600s, but a coffee house didn’t open there until 1645. The first coffee house in London opened in 1652 and began a hundred-year love affair between the drink and the city. Coffee unquestionably inspired culture, art, trade and politics and left a lasting impact on the city itself.
In France, it was the influence of fashion that spread coffee drinking. Coffee had been gifted to the court of Louis XIV, and its growing popularity there spread the habit of coffee drinking into Paris.
Vienna was another city that would develop a rich café culture in the late 1600s. The story of the first café in Vienna, the Blue Bottle, using coffee beans left behind by the Ottomans fleeing after the failed siege of Vienna in 1683, is charming but probably not true; recent evidence suggests the first café there opened in 1685.
One key moment in the spread of coffee drinking and coffee culture actually revolved around tea. The Boston Tea Party in 1773, when American colonists protested against British oppression by attacking merchant ships in Boston Harbour and throwing chests of tea overboard, was not just an important rejection of the British Empire, but also marked the moment that coffee became a patriotic drink in the United States. A rapidly growing population meant a rapidly growing market and made the US increasingly influential in the coffee industry in the years to come.
CHANGE THROUGH INNOVATION
The US was also where key innovations came from, that allowed coffee to be an affordable staple in every home around the world. In 1900 a company called Hill Bros. began packing coffee into vacuum-sealed cans. Extending the shelf life this way meant fewer households would have to roast their own coffee, but made business more difficult for small local roasting companies.
A year later a Japanese chemist named Satori Kato patented his process for producing instant, or soluble, coffee. Until very recently he was thought to have been the first to produce it, but recent discoveries now credit the invention to David Strang in New Zealand in 1890. The process elevated convenience above quality, but it made coffee drinking easier for many, if not necessarily cheaper. Today instant coffee is still incredibly popular around the world.
In Europe, key innovations focused more on the café than coffee at home. There are various claimants to the first espresso machine, but patents using these principles began to be filed from 1884 onwards. Luigi Bezzera would patent his machine in 1901, and he is often credited as having invented the espresso machine.
These machines allowed café operators to make lots of cups of coffee, of a similar size and strength to filter coffee, very quickly. The great leap forward in espresso technology would come with the use of a large spring to produce very high pressures. The claim to this innovation belongs to Achille Gaggia in 1945, though how he acquired the patent remains a little murky. This high-pressure brewing produced espresso as we know it today: a small, concentrated cup of coffee topped with a deep brown foam, called crema.
The espresso bar boom that happened in many cities in the 1950s and 1960s was as much cultural as it was about the consumption of coffee. However, from a technical perspective, espresso brewing was perfect for cafés because one machine could now rapidly produce a whole range of drinks.
COFFEE TODAY
It would be impossible to write about modern coffee drinking without discussing Starbucks. The company’s roots were in roasting and selling coffee beans from a shop in Seattle, but it was transformed by Howard Schultz into the global phenomenon that we know today. Schultz claimed to be inspired by his travels to Italy, though the modern Starbucks experience would be unrecognizable to a native Italian. Starbucks, and businesses like it, undoubtedly paved the way for the growth in speciality coffee that we see around the world today. Starbucks made coffee an even more popular out-of-home drink and raised expectations for what a cup of coffee could cost. The company remains hugely influential, and is pioneering coffee drinking in new markets like China.
What defines modern speciality coffee is the focus on where coffee comes from, and how that impacts its taste. This focus has influenced how cafés brew, sell and serve cups of coffee. Coffee drinking has evolved from simple morning stimulation into an expression of self, an expression of values or of conscious consumption. Coffee drinking is now woven into a myriad of different cultures around the world.
Today, there is a coffee shop for every taste, from the mass-market purveyors of sweet, creamy coffee-flavoured drinks to the craft coffee shops serving single-estate pour-overs.