By: Kheena Medina
Coffee is the most valuable legally traded commodity in the world. Let's not deny it, we love coffee. We drink it almost every time of our lives, and we drink it in massive quantities.
It is said that 2.25 billion cups of coffee are consumed each day worldwide. Wild, isn't it? What's wilder is that, aside from petroleum, coffee is the second-most traded commodity in the world.
It is believed that coffee is discovered by a goat herder, in Ethiopia, named Kaldi. Kaldi found his goats frolicking and full of energy after eating the red fruit of the coffee shrub. After witnessing their strange behavior, a monk took some of the fruit back to his fellow monks; they too spent the night awake and alert. Of course, they would have been reacting to coffee’s high dose of caffeine. Kaldi told the abbot of the local monastery about this and the abbot came up with the idea of drying and boiling the berries to make a beverage. He threw the berries into the fire, whence the unmistakable aroma of what we now know as coffee drifted through the night air. The now roasted beans were raked from the embers, ground up and dissolved in hot water: so was made the world’s first cup of coffee.
Before coffee became our beverage of choice every morning, and even at night, it appeared in different preparations first. In its unprocessed and most basic form, coffee is a cherry-like fruit which becomes red when ripe. At the center of the red coffee fruit is where the bean is found. On the early period, the fruit is mixed with animal fat so it can create a protein-rich snack bar. It was also became a wine at one point in time. Phew! These variety of different preparations of coffee is surely interesting!
This is where we started..
11th century - Coffee plant was discovered in Ethiopia.
14th century - Coffee cultivation reached Yemen and for 300 years, it was drunk following the recipe first used in Ethiopia.
1555 - Istanbul was introduced to coffee during the reign of Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent by Özdemir Pasha.
1615 - Europeans got to their first taste of coffee.
1644 - The first coffee house beans, along with the apparatus used to prepare and serve coffee, were brought to Marseilles by Monsieur de la Roque, the french ambassador.
1645 - The first coffee house opened in Italy
1660 - Merchants from Marseilles who had grown to love the beverage they had first stated in Istanbul began to import coffee to the city, thus sating Marseilles's appetite for coffee.
1668 – Coffee reached in North America
1669 - Paris was introduced to coffee by Hoşsohbet Nüktedan Süleyman Ağa, who was sent by Sultan Mehmet IV as ambassador to the court of King Louis XIV of France.
1696 - The first coffeehouse in New York, "The King's Arms"
1711 - the first Javanese coffee beans were sold on the open market in Amsterdam.
1714 - the Dutch presented Louis XIV with a coffee sapling from their plantations on Java.
1723 - a French mariner named Gabriel du Clieu took a sapling from the Jardin des Plantes to the island of Martinique. From here, the coffee plant spread to other Caribbean islands, as well as to Central and South America.
1727 - a Portuguese sailor named de Mello Palheta carried coffee saplings to Brazil from French Guyana.
After these several events came the mid 19th century and coffee had become one of the most important commodities in world trade. Coffee is now are usual to-drink whenever we feel like to and don't deny it, coffee is the most loved beverage in the world!
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