Coffee

by Read Listen Learn

It comes from the Horn of Africa, its name means ‘tonic’ in Arabic and it can go to your head but it’s very popular for breakfast. We are, of course, talking about coffee – one of the world’s most popular drinks. And that’s hardly surprising when you remember that a cup of coffee can suppress your appetite, raise your IQ, quicken your reflexes and help you to keep working, better and for longer. And the reason is the caffeine that coffee naturally contains.

We know where coffee comes from originally – Ethiopia, but we’re not sure who first used it or when. Coffee is a bush that has small round fruits, sometimes called the ‘cherries’. As you can imagine, these coffee cherries taste very bitter so people probably only ate them when there was no other food around. They noticed that even a few of these cherries would kill the hunger they felt for hours at a time. Soon, someone discovered that this effect was strongest when you made a drink from the stone or bean at the middle of the cherry, preferably after roasting the beans in the fire.

The process remains the same today: remove the bean from the cherry, wash it, dry it, toast it, grind it, put it in a pot and add boiling water. Five minutes later you have a delicious cup of coffee – and who can resist that smell?

Arabia lies across a narrow neck of sea from Ethiopia and before long the Arabs had developed a taste for the bitter but energising drink. The next step was obvious. They brought some of the coffee bushes across the sea to Arabia and started coffee plantations. This was the beginning of coffee’s journey around the world. The Arabs started another coffee-planting tradition as well. They brought black slaves over from Africa to farm the coffee.

The European international trade that grew so rapidly from about 1600 brought coffee to the dining rooms and restaurants of Europe. Cafes opened in towns and cities everywhere and the new drink fired conversations in people’s homes too. As demand for coffee grew, so did supply. The European merchants took coffee to the Americas and the Caribbean where, again, African slaves were used for all the heavy work. And, as more and more was grown, so more and more was drunk, and vice versa.

Coffee needed sugar with it and so a whole industry sprang up just to grow sugar cane. Once again, African slaves were used and the slave trade alone was another huge business bringing money and business to Europe. The sheer size of these growing markets and the need to finance them caused the birth of stock markets in European cities trading in coffee, tea, sugar and much more. And where were these growing stock exchanges? They were, of course, in the best and biggest coffee houses and cafés.

The traders would occupy a table, call for some coffee and cake, and begin to sell and buy stocks and shares. If a note of credit or a purchase order needed to be taken from one trader’s table to another’s, then the waiters who brought the coffee were happy to do the walking. Still today, the people who work at the London Stock Exchange wear the same brightly coloured waistcoats as the coffee house waiters of the 17th and 18th centuries.

These stock-exchange/coffee houses soon became lively places where fortunes were made and lost and, if sometimes the trading reached fever pitch, might that not be caused by the coffee the traders were drinking all day long?

Coffee seemed like the fuel of world trade and international business. By the mid-1700s, coffee was already an important crop in St. Domingue and elsewhere in the Caribbean. Brazil, the country that would become synonymous with coffee production, was starting to develop coffee zones, first around Rio de Janeiro and then around Sao Paolo. Coffee also became a great imperial crop. It grew in warm, tropical regions but most of it was consumed in Europe. Plantations were established in many colonies. Jamaica and Kenya for the British; Indochina for the French; and the Dutch had begun to plant coffee in Indonesia.

In the war of 1812 between the newly independent U.S.A. and its former colonial master, Britain, the British would not allow tea from India onto the American market. The North Americans switched to coffee which they could get easily from the Caribbean and Latin America and the U.S.A. went on to become the world’s single biggest coffee consumer which stimulated coffee growing in Latin America and the Caribbean even more.

Two distinct coffee tastes formed in Europe. It was a North/South divide. Northern Europeans, like the Dutch and the Germans, tended to make a large, weak coffee and add cream and sugar. The Southern Europeans, like the French and Italians, based everything on a small, very strong coffee called an ‘espresso’. All their other coffees were built on it. You could add a little hot water for a longer coffee, or cream and cinnamon, or hot milk, or brandy etc. etc. Coffee could also be used to flavour cakes and ice-creams and, iced, it made a very nice summer drink. And, if you had had a little too much alcohol, coffee seemed to be the only thing that might sober you up a little.

However, there have always been health issues around coffee. Although it is good at waking you up in the morning, it can also make you tense and nervous and stop you sleeping when you want or need to. On the other hand, it is good for people trying to lose weight because it both kills the appetite and acts as a laxative. Strong black coffee is also a good disinfectant and may be good for the heart, stimulating and exercising it.

By the late 1960s, North Americans had started to blame coffee for a number of health problems from premature grey hair through cancer to insomnia. People having trouble sleeping were told to stop drinking coffee and sales fell quickly as many switched to tea. The coffee industry responded by introducing decaffeinated coffee where the stimulating caffeine has mostly been taken out.

In recent years, health experts have begun to say that strong coffee, in moderation of course, is good for your heart and actually helps to keep cancer away. And that insomnia? Well, it seems much of that was about stress in modern American life and the new habit of keeping a T.V. set in the bedroom.

This has come as good news to the millions of people around the world who are enjoying the current coffee-bar revolution. The new style cafes, some in chains and many independent, with sofas and bistro menus mean that coffee, cafes and the conversation that goes with them are more popular now than they ever were in the 17th century.