History of coffee

The history of coffee circulates with a stock of stories that almost everyone knows and almost no one dates. The goatherd and his restless animals, the exiled saint who boils berries, the seven seeds brought back from Arabia in a beard, the plant watered during the crossing by an officer who goes without water himself, the seeds obtained from a governor's wife, the pope who tastes the drink of the infidels and finds it good.

These stories are beautiful, they are taught, they are painted on sacks and on shop signs. Yet there is a modest, verifiable question to be asked about them, which is not the question of their truth: in which book, in which year, does this story first appear in writing? The answer is a fact of the archive, one that can be established and cited, whereas the truth of a scene a thousand years old cannot be established at all.

A late story is not for all that a false one: an ancient oral tradition may wait centuries before being printed. But when the date of the text is known, we at least know in what period the story was useful, and to whom.

The oldest sustained text on the origin of coffee is neither European nor legendary. Abd al-Qadir ibn Muhammad al-Ansari al-Jaziri al-Hanbali completed in 996 of the Hijra, the Muslim reckoning that begins in 622, that is, in 1587 of our era, a treatise entitled Umdat al-safwa fi hill al-qahwa, which can be rendered roughly as “what the pure rely on concerning the lawfulness of coffee.” The manuscript is held at the Bibliothèque nationale de France under the shelfmark Arabe 4590.

It has seven chapters: the etymology of the word, the virtues of the bean, then above all the religious quarrel in Mecca in 1511 and the refutation of those who wanted to ban the drink, and it ends with a collection of Arabic verses composed during that quarrel. A Latin note on the flyleaf of the volume sums it up: a book in seven chapters, published in the year 996 of the Hijra, when a hundred and twenty years had passed since the use of this drink had become established in Arabia Felix.

Yet this text recounts neither goats nor miracle. It attributes the adoption of coffee to a mufti of Aden, that is, a jurist charged with pronouncing the law, Jamal al-Din al-Dhabhani, who died around 1470 and who is said to have spread its use around 1454. A hundred and thirty years separate the thing told from the text that tells it, and al-Jaziri himself refers to an earlier author, Shihab al-Din, of whom no copy is known. The oldest surviving witness thus rests on a lost witness.

This manuscript reached Europe in the baggage of Nointel, ambassador of Louis XIV to the Ottoman Porte. Antoine Galland, the orientalist who would later give the Thousand and One Nights their French form, analyzed it and translated part of it under the title De l'origine et du progrès du café, in 1699. More than a century later, Sylvestre de Sacy edited its first two chapters in his Chrestomathie arabe, an anthology of selected passages intended for the students of the École des langues orientales, published in 1806 and reissued in 1826.

The count is instructive: between the use attested around 1454 and the treatise of 1587, a hundred and thirty years; between the treatise and its first French reading, a hundred and twelve more.

The goatherd, for his part, enters print in 1671. The book is by Antonio Fausto Naironi, a Maronite, professor of Chaldean and Syriac languages at the college in Rome: De saluberrima potione cahue, seu cafe nuncupata discursus, printed in Rome by Michele Ercole and dedicated to a cardinal. It is the first printed treatise devoted to coffee alone. In it we find a herder in Arabia Felix, animals that become lively after eating certain fruits, and a monk from the neighborhood who makes a decoction from them to keep his brothers awake.

No name appears there. The goatherd is called Kaldi only in later retellings, and I have not managed to establish with certainty the date at which this name becomes attached to the character: it is reported sometimes in 19th-century English versions, sometimes in the mass diffusion that Ukers gave it in 1922, and I have verified none of these earliest occurrences myself.

What is certain and verifiable is that the name is absent from the 1671 text. The events recounted are commonly placed around the 9th century; the text, for its part, is eight centuries younger.

Galland, in 1699, does not hold back from saying so. He reproaches Naironi for having accepted as history the stories of Omar and the Abyssinian goatherd, then adds a remark that illuminates the scene better than any refutation: the abbot and his monks, he writes in substance, are the mufti Gemaleddin and Muhammad al-Hadrami, and the monks are dervishes, that is, members of a Sufi brotherhood who keep vigil while reciting.

The Yemeni story was translated into a convent. The usefulness of this translation is easy to understand: in 1671, in Rome, in a work dedicated to a prince of the Church, a drink from the Muslim world gains a great deal from having been revealed to monks. This is not a falsification, it is a work of acclimatization, the same one that many plants and many words have undergone.

Sheikh Omar follows the same path, in the opposite direction. Tradition places him in 656 of the Hijra, that is, in 1258, exiled to Mount Ousab for misconduct, reduced to boiling the berries he finds, then recalled in triumph to Mocha, where a convent is built for him. The written foundation is the 1587 manuscript, thus three and a half centuries after the supposed events, and the story reaches the French public only with Galland in 1699 and Jean de La Roque in 1716.

In the meantime it has accumulated embellishments: in a version reported by Ukers, the dead master reappears under a veil and grown by ten cubits, water gushes from the ground, a bird of marvelous plumage leads the exile to the tree. Ukers himself makes no secret of it: in the chronology that closes his book, the date 1258 carries a note marker that refers to a single word, “legendary,” and a second that signals that the date is approximate.

The main vehicle of the story thus flags it as a story. What the legend of Omar contributes is clear: it attaches coffee to a lineage of saints, that of Shadhili, patron of Mocha, and it gives a drink contested by jurists a protector whom the jurists cannot challenge.

There is one case where the dating is complete, and it serves as a model for all the others. Vienna, 1683: the besieged city, the Ottoman army withdrawing, the sacks of green beans left behind, Kolschitzky receiving them as a reward and opening the Blue Bottle. This story first appears in 1783, from the pen of Gottfried Uhlich, exactly a century after the siege, and the historian Karl Teply established this in 1980.

The city's archive says otherwise: the privilege of serving coffee in Vienna was granted on January 17, 1685 to the Armenian merchant Johannes Diodato. Uhlich's story nonetheless won; it has its statue and its street. It is the textbook case, because one can see what a centenary is for: in 1783, Vienna tells itself the story of its siege, and the founding of the Viennese café finds a hero there rather than a commercial privilege.

The Indian tradition of Baba Budan, a pilgrim returned from Mecca with seven fertile seeds hidden on his person, planted on the slopes of Chikmagalur, resists this exercise. Ukers, in 1922, gives it as plausible while hesitating over the date, “as early as 1600” according to some, 1695 according to an authority he judges better, and his chronology marks the entry with two signs at once, approximate date and legendary story.

I have not found the first putting into writing of the seven-seeds story and so I do not give one. What is attested is more mundane and more solid: coffee grew in the Mysore hills well before the English began plantations there in 1840, the range bears the name of Baba Budan, and the shrine exists. The number seven, a number of blessing, and the hiding place in the beard belong to the later life of the story, the one in which a tale grows more specific as it ages.

Gabriel de Clieu offers the opposite case, one where we have an author. The story of the plant carried under a glass frame and watered during the crossing from his own water ration comes from a letter from the man himself, published in L'Année littéraire in 1774. It is a first-hand account, and it was written some fifty years after the crossing, in the very year of its author's death, when he was close to eighty-eight.

Ukers notes the wavering: some date the arrival to 1720, others to 1723; Jardin supposes two voyages, one of them failed, to reconcile the two; there is hesitation between one plant and three, de Clieu saying one. The sentence about the shared water is in his own hand, and it has made its way: a poem in L'Année littéraire the same year, verses by Esmenard, a porcelain service commissioned in his honor, a botanical garden in Fort-de-France opened in 1918 and dedicated to him.

One can read this success without contempt and without naivety: it places a colonial fortune under the sign of private devotion, one man and one plant, where there were fleets, monopolies and forced labor.

Francisco de Melo Palheta raises the same question with fewer documents. What is attested administratively fits in few words: in 1727, an officer of the Portuguese crown is sent to Cayenne on a border matter, and he returns with seeds and plants. The bouquet offered by the governor's wife, in which the seeds that French Guiana forbade to export were supposedly hidden, belongs to another layer of the story, and I have not been able to date its first telling.

Two negative indications deserve to be noted rather than a verdict: Ukers, in 1922, does not enter this episode in his chronology, where the Brazilian entry for those years mentions only the failure of the Pará plantation in 1723; and the gallant version circulates mainly in 20th-century literature, where Pendergrast takes it up in 1999. The scene has the world's greatest coffee economy begin with a gift, that is, with a favor granted, rather than with a state mission and with what the plantation then demanded in human beings.

That leaves the pope. No known pontifical act concerns coffee, either to ban it or to bless it. Ukers relates the story of the priests asking Clement VIII to proscribe the drink of Satan, and of the pope who tastes it and proposes to baptize it, introducing it with a cautious formula, “according to a much-cited legend,” and naming no source. The detail that matters lies elsewhere: he does not include this episode in his chronology, whereas he includes Rhazes, Avicenna and Omar there with the mark “legendary.” I have not found the first printed version of this scene and so I propose none.

What can be dated around it, on the other hand, is well dated: in 1585, Gianfrancesco Morosini reports to the Senate of Venice that the Turks drink a black water made from a seed called cavee; in 1615, Pietro Della Valle writes from Constantinople that he will bring some back. The baptism anecdote settles in a single scene the question that those years were really asking, whether a drink of Islam could become Christian. The dedication of Naironi's book to a cardinal, in 1671, answers the same question by other means.

Put end to end, these gaps trace a slope. The oldest written testimony is Arabic, sober, administrative: a mufti of Aden, a date, a quarrel over law. The picturesque scenes, the goatherd, the marvelous bird, the amused pope, the governor's wife's bouquet, are later and, for the most part, European. That does not disqualify them, it situates them. Ukers, who more than anyone made them circulate, had taken care to put at the foot of his chronology two notes of three words, one for approximate dates, the other for legendary facts; the use made of his book has often erased these notes.

The proposal of this chapter is to put them back: keep the stories, which have their beauty and their usefulness, and set beside each one the date of its oldest text.

-300000Emergence of Homo sapiens in Africa-3300First writing in Mesopotamia622The Hijra, start of the Muslim calendar1347The Black Death reaches Europe1453Capture of Constantinople by the Ottomans1492Christopher Columbus reaches America

Two landmarks of this period are not about people, and they are the only ones that rest on a measurement rather than a story. Between 610,000 and 350,000 years ago, on the high plateaus of East Africa, two wild coffee plants crossed: Coffea canephora, the species now called canephora, and Coffea eugenioides, which is not drunk. The descendant keeps the chromosome sets of both its parents instead of retaining only one, a doubling that makes it fertile where an ordinary hybrid would remain sterile, and a third species is born from it, Coffea arabica. This is what Salojärvi's team established in 2024 by comparing the genomes of the three species. Two consequences follow.

The first is that arabica is young: its hybridization is barely older than our own species. The second is that it was born from a single meeting, perhaps a single pair of plants. A species that begins this way contains, at the outset, only the diversity of its two parents. This is the first of the two bottlenecks whose effects this site follows. The second, that of Yemen, comes at the end of this chapter: it created nothing, it narrowed.

When coffee leaf rust is spotted in Ceylon in 1869 and goes around the Indian Ocean within twenty years, it is not only a disease that travels, it is a plant almost without variants paying a bill opened half a million years ago. The catalog of World Coffee Research notes again in 2025 that 97.55% of Brazilian cultivars descend from Typica and Bourbon.

The second measured landmark is more delicate, and it needs to be said what it is not. About 30,500 years ago, population genetics models make the wild arabicas of Ethiopia and the population that would later found the cultivars diverge. These models, SMC++ and fastsimcoal2, read today's genomes and work backward to calculate the population sizes that would explain what is observed.

They therefore date no human act: nobody was cultivating anything 30,500 years ago. They date the moment when two groups of plants stopped exchanging their genes. Taking this date for a domestication amounts to confusing a natural separation with a decision.

Between this figure and the 15th century, the chronicle has a gap, and this gap is the real subject of the chapter. None of the landmarks that follow rests on an excavation, a charred bean or a dated vessel: they all rest on texts, and all these texts were written centuries after the events they report. A drink leaves nothing: an infusion cannot be preserved, a vigil cannot be petrified.

What we call the origin of coffee is therefore, literally, memory put into writing late, by people who had a reason to write it.

That reason can be named. The first account held to be authentic is that of Sheikh Abd al-Qadir, written in 1587, preserved in an Arabic manuscript at the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris and translated by Antoine Galland in 1699. 1587 is seventy-six years after the trial of Mecca, in the middle of a century of quarrel: coffee is attacked there as a novelty, and a novelty is defended with an ancestry.

To write the origin of coffee, in the 16th century, is to plead a case. From this manuscript come Galland, La Roque in 1716, Ukers in 1922, then the pages you are reading: all our knowledge of the origins passes through one text, two translations and two compilers.

The two oldest dates of the timeline are read in this light. Around 900, Rhazes, the great physician of Baghdad, is said to have been the first to mention coffee under the name bunchum; around 1000, Avicenna is said to have explained its virtues, under the same name. Ukers marks these two dates as legendary, and he is right: a word does not prove a plant. Nothing guarantees that the bunchum of the manuscripts designates the bean we drink.

It must be added that these two attributions are convenient. Rhazes and Avicenna are the two highest medical authorities of Islam; to name them as first witnesses is to endow coffee with a medical credential, precisely what would be debated before the judges of Mecca in 1511. These legendary dates are not innocent errors. They are arguments.

Around 1258 comes the most solid legend, that of Sheikh Omar, disciple of Shadhili and patron saint of Mocha. Exiled to Ousab for misconduct, he survives by boiling berries; the sick of Mocha come to consult him, are healed by the decoction, and recall him in triumph. This story has in its favor that it appears in the Arabic chronicle that Galland translated, that is, in the closest source we have, and La Roque gave it his preference in 1732.

It also has a recognizable form: the discovery arises there from necessity and not from chance. Ukers classes it among the legends nonetheless, and prudence stops there: it is the oldest story that coffee drinkers have told themselves about themselves, which does not make it true.

Then there is Kaldi, around 850, the goatherd of Abyssinia whose goats dance and whose billy goat, usually so dignified, gambols. This is the legend that everyone knows, and the youngest of all. It is late, it is of French origin, and La Roque was already dismantling it in 1732 by opposing to it the story of the mufti of Aden, that religious jurist from whom the Yemeni Sufis got their custom.

One detail is enough to date it from the inside: the monk, in this version, first throws the berries into the fire, and it is the smell of the roasted bean that converts him. Roasting is thus already there, in a story supposed to recount the moment when nothing was known about coffee. The chronology of the facts is here the reverse of that of the texts: the older the date displayed, the more recent the story. The goat, for its part, has stayed on the packages.

The first solid fact of coffee's human history therefore arrives late, and it does not arrive in Ethiopia. In the 15th and 16th centuries, Yemen brings into cultivation material that came from Ethiopia, probably through Zeila and Aden. Why there, and not in the country where the plant grows on its own? Because it needed something other than coffee trees: terraces, channeled water, a port and a state capable of taxing.

Yemen had all four. Bani Matar, Haraz, Yafe' are developed slopes, farmed dry and irrigated, at a distance from the humid forests. This ecological accident, pointed out by McCook, had a global consequence: coffee leaf rust lives in those forests, and Yemeni cultivation settled out of its reach. For three centuries the world drank a coffee that its principal disease had not followed, which would lead 19th-century planters to believe it did not exist.

In the same period, between 1450 and 1500, the Sufi brotherhoods, those mystical fraternities of Islam whose services are held at night, adopt the decoction to stay awake. Here are the two halves of the matter: a country that knows how to produce and a custom that gives a reason to drink. The price of this passage can still be read in the plants. Almost all arabica cultivated outside Ethiopia descends from the small number of plants that passed through Yemen: Montagnon and colleagues find only three genetic groups there in 2022, SL34, Typica-Bourbon and New-Yemen, and show in passing that a local name such as Udaini designates not a lineage but a reputation. A terroir name is not a genotype, and that has been true from the start.

Then coffee leaves the mosques and takes the pilgrims' road. From 1470 to 1500, its use reaches Mecca and Medina from Aden. This move of a few hundred kilometers is the most important of the period, because Mecca is not a city like any other: the entire Muslim world comes there every year and leaves again. A drink adopted there is distributed everywhere, free of charge, by travelers who have nothing to sell.

The dazzling spread of the following century has this mechanism and no other. The first ban too: it is in Mecca, in 1511, that coffee meets its first police, because that is where it had become visible to everyone.

One last line of the timeline calls for caution. Ukers dates to about 1505 the introduction of the coffee plant to Ceylon by the Arabs. Nothing confirms it, no later landmark attaches to it, and the true plantation of Ceylon is Dutch, in 1658. The entry is kept because it appears in the reference chronology, and the doubt with it. Such is the state of the file in 1500: a species born of an accident, a culture established on terraces, a religious custom becoming urban, a port that is going to matter, and not a single page written by those who lived all this.

1517Luther posts his 95 Theses at Wittenberg1520Suleiman the Magnificent takes the Ottoman throne1543Copernicus publishes De revolutionibus1571Naval battle of Lepanto1588Failure of the Invincible Armada

In 1500, coffee is a regional custom: it is drunk in Yemen and in the holy cities of the Hejaz, and nowhere else. In 1600, it is drunk from Cairo to Constantinople, in rooms that have a sign, a price list and a proprietor; an empire draws an income from it; a botanist has described it in Latin in a book printed in Venice.

A hundred years to go from one to the other. It would be convenient to attribute this to taste, but taste never explains a speed. This one lies in two dates of conquest that the timeline leaves side by side without linking them.

In 1516 and 1517, Selim I overthrows the Mamluk sultanate and takes Syria and then Egypt; the chronicle records that he brings coffee back to Constantinople among his booty. In 1536, the Ottomans occupy Yemen. These two dates, together, place within a single political space the country that produces, the routes that carry and the cities that consume. Between Mocha and the Bosphorus, coffee no longer has a border to cross, only the customs houses of the same state.

The merchandise goes up by way of Jeddah and Suez to Cairo and Constantinople, and the governor of Mocha pays his revenue to the treasury every year. Coffee then ceases to be a custom and becomes a revenue, and this decides the rest of the century.

The conquest displaces not only bales, it displaces men. The first coffeehouses of Constantinople, in 1554, are opened by Schemsi, from Damascus, and Hekem, from Aleppo, that is, by two men from the Arab provinces annexed thirty-seven years earlier. The capital did not invent coffee: it learned it from its new subjects, and the word itself arrived with them. An empire is first of all a machine for circulating the habits of the vanquished.

At the same time, the drink changes nature without changing recipe. In 1510, in Cairo, the Yemeni dervishes, that is, the members of the brotherhoods, drink it on nights of devotion from a large vessel of red clay: the superior draws from it for each one while chanting, then the bowl passes to the laymen. It is a rite, and it costs nothing. In 1554, in Constantinople, the cup costs one aspre, a small Ottoman silver coin, and one sits on sofas kept clean.

Between these two scenes, the essential has happened: coffee has a price. A drink that has a price has a supplier, premises, a clientele and a possible tax. It also has a by-product, for from the same fruit two drinks are drawn, that of the beans and that of the husks, the “Sultana's coffee.”

The series of bans, Mecca in 1511, Cairo in 1534, Constantinople in 1543 and then around 1580, is detailed in the account devoted to the question, which shows that the motive was not the drink but the room. What the chronicle adds is the calendar. Suleiman has coffee thrown into the sea at Constantinople in 1543, seven years after his troops took the province whose coffee pays him, and trade continues through the very city that has just condemned it.

The same state forbids on one side what it taxes on the other, in the same decade. The contradiction did not last, because an administration always ends up preferring revenue to principle.

The way out is read in two landmarks that are never brought together. In 1524, the qadi of Mecca, that is, the judge of the city, closes the coffeehouses for disorder but lets people drink at home; his successor reopens them under license. Around 1580, in Constantinople, the mufti having had roasted coffee declared charcoal, and therefore forbidden, Murad III has the rooms closed, and the officers charged with keeping them shut turn a blind eye in return for payment.

A license and a bribe are the same solution, once legal and once not: in both cases, the ban is turned into a tariff. Ottoman power did at retail what it was already doing wholesale at Mocha. It stopped preventing and began collecting.

The ground of the dispute, for its part, is medical. The medicine of the time classifies each substance by degrees of hot, cold, dry and moist, and lawfulness can be deduced from this classification. In 1511, in Mecca, the two Hakimani brothers, Persian physicians, declare the plant cold and dry; one of them feared for his clientele. Twelve years later, around 1523, a physician of Cairo asks the same question and answers it in the negative: coffee goes to the head, therefore it is not lawful.

This time the matter dies, and the chronicle says why. The physicians of Cairo valued this new adjunct of their pharmacopoeia. Between 1511 and 1523, coffee went from suspect novelty to professional asset, and its legal fate followed its economic fate. The doctrine had not moved; the interests had. Where nobody had an interest against it, in Damascus, in Aleppo, there was no quarrel at all.

Another landmark shows the same reversal, but at the top. The seraglio, the sultan's court, equips itself with coffee officers, the kahvedjibachi, at the very moment when the religious authorities obtain closures. And in the rooms of Constantinople one sees arrive the future judges, provincial qadis in search of a post, professors, officers of the seraglio and merchants. These houses were called “schools of the wise.” In an empire where offices are obtained through presence and recommendation, a room where those who appoint and those waiting to be appointed sit together is an employment office.

This explains the nervousness of power better than the word sedition. It is not only that people talk there, it is that careers are handed out there.

One landmark, on the other hand, asks to be kept at a distance. Around 1573, we read, refusing coffee to one's wife was among the Turks a legitimate ground for divorce. The formula traveled from traveler to traveler as far as Ukers, who gives it after a 19th-century author, and we have verified it nowhere. What it surely attests is that Ottoman coffee was not only a matter of public rooms: it had entered homes, enough for Europeans to describe it as a domestic institution before having tasted it.

For Europeans end up looking, and the way they look decides the following two centuries. In 1582, the German physician Leonhard Rauwolf describes in Aleppo the “chaube”: it is the first printed mention of coffee in Europe. In 1585, Gianfrancesco Morosini, a Venetian magistrate in Constantinople, reports to the Senate that the Turks drink a black water, as hot as they can bear it, an infusion of a seed called “cavee.” In 1592, Prospero Alpini publishes in Venice, in Latin, the first printed description of the tree, which he calls bon, and of the drink, which he calls caova, brought back from Egypt.

Look at the places. Aleppo, Constantinople, Cairo. Not a word of Yemen, and for good reason: none of these men went there. Europe met coffee in the cities that consumed it and never in those that produced it. It brought back Turkish and Arabic names, a scene from a room, a description of a market, but no correct idea of the plant nor the means of obtaining it.

Hence the belief that will last a hundred years and that the account of the escapes finds intact in Dufour in 1685: coffee would grow only in Arabia and nowhere else. This error is not stupidity, it is the consequence of a mode of observation: one describes only what one has been able to approach. Let us note, finally, that these three testimonies are printed: it is printing, less than a century and a half old, that turns a traveler's note into a European fact.

The century ends by turning back on itself. In 1587, Sheikh Abd al-Qadir writes the first account held to be authentic on the origin of coffee. He writes it seventy-six years after the trial of Mecca, in a society that is still arguing about the lawfulness of the drink, and so partly to close the dispute through antiquity. Galland will translate it in 1699, La Roque will use it in 1716, Ukers will summarize it in 1922, and from there come the legends of the preceding chapter, including those that Ukers marks as doubtful.

A quarrelsome century is a century that writes: the best source we have on the origins of coffee was born of the effort to defend it.

On the threshold of 1600, let us count. Coffee has a public, a price, a clientele of notables, a police that has given up, a tax, a learned literature in Arabic and three printed attestations in Europe. It still has only one producing country, a single port of shipment and not one plant outside Arabia. None of the great questions of the following century, how to get the plant out, how to make it grow elsewhere, how to pay for what is drunk of it, has yet been asked. They will all be asked at the same time.

1618Start of the Thirty Years' War1648Treaties of Westphalia1649Charles I beheaded in London1666Great Fire of London1687Newton, Principia

In 1600, Europe does not drink coffee: it reads about it. The first three printed mentions come from a physician, a botanist and a diplomat, never from a merchant. Leonhard Rauwolf describes in 1582 the chaube served in Aleppo, Gianfrancesco Morosini reports to the Senate of Venice in 1585 that the Turks drink a black water as hot as they can bear it, and Prospero Alpini publishes in Venice in 1592 the first printed description of the coffee plant, brought back from Egypt.

These men write in Latin, for scholars. Coffee thus enters Europe as an object of study before being a commodity, and this detail governs the whole century: when the drink arrives for good, it will pass through the apothecaries and not through the taverns, and it will take eighty years to stop asking whether it heals or kills.

Why so late, when Constantinople has had its coffeehouses since 1554? Because the plant belongs to a single empire and leaves by a single port. Since the Ottoman occupation of Yemen in 1536, Mocha coffee has been a line of the imperial budget, taxed and convoyed through Jeddah and Suez. Europeans therefore meet coffee only where their merchants and envoys meet Ottomans: in Aleppo, in Cairo, in Constantinople.

Venice is the first served because it is the port of that trade. Pietro Della Valle writes from Constantinople in 1615 that he will bring some back, the thing being unknown in his homeland; in 1616, Pieter Van den Broecke brings the first coffee to Holland; it is not until 1640 that Wurffbain puts a true commercial cargo on sale in Amsterdam. Twenty-five years between a traveler's curiosity and the first lot for sale: that is the time it takes for a route to settle in. The detail of these successive escapes is told elsewhere on this site, in The escapes.

In the meantime, one tiny thing changes the drink itself. In 1625, in Cairo, coffee is sweetened for the first time; in 1638, the botanist Johann Vesling, based in Venice, describes two to three thousand coffeehouses in the same city of Cairo, notes that people are beginning to sweeten it there and to candy the beans into comfits, and observes that in Venice coffee is leaving the cabinets of the curious to enter the apothecaries as a drug.

These two notations are worth more than they appear. The first explains why coffee was able to become a mass drink in Europe: alone, it is bitter, and Europe did not have the Ottoman habit of bitterness. Sugar spared it that. Now sugar becomes cheap at exactly this moment, and for a reason that belongs to the next chapter: the plantations of the West Indies.

From its first European cup, coffee is a compound of two colonial commodities. The second notation, for its part, explains the seller: it is an apothecary who opens the first outlet in Oxford, and it is before physicians, in Marseille, that the city will debate in 1679.

The opening of the rooms follows a geography that seems capricious and is not: Venice in 1645, Oxford around 1650 with a Jewish man, Jacobs, London in 1652, Marseille in 1671, Paris and the Procope in 1686. England moves fast, France slowly, and both have their reasons. In England, coffee arrives through the university: Nathaniel Conopios, a Cretan student of Balliol College, introduces it in Oxford in 1637, and royalist students around 1655 push the apothecary Arthur Tillyard to serve it publicly.

The country is then in civil war, control of print has loosened, and news has become a commodity that people come looking for. Above all, the coffeehouse belongs to no guild: it sells neither beer nor wine, nobody has a monopoly to defend against it, it opens without permission. In France, on the contrary, coffee enters through the court, with the embassy of Suleiman Aga in 1669, then comes down into the street with the Armenian Pascal at the Saint-Germain fair in 1672. What comes from above spreads less quickly than what settles into an alley of the City.

For one must look at the price. In 1662, at the Turk's Head in Exchange Alley, a pound of coffee sells for four to six shillings eight pence, whereas it had been worth up to five guineas, that is, more than twenty times as much. The cup costs a penny, hence the nickname penny universities given to the rooms of Oxford and London. A penny is the price of a seat for the day in a room where one finds merchants, scholars and men of letters.

No institution of the time sold that at that rate. The state notices at once: coffee enters the English statutes as early as 1660, taxed at four pence per gallon made and sold, and in 1663 all houses must be licensed. This is the fundamental difference between Europe and the Ottoman East of the same decade. Where Köprülü has drinkers sewn into leather sacks in 1656, London counts gallons and issues patents.

The motive is no more moral on one side than on the other: a power that needs money prefers revenue to a ban. The series of bans, moreover, is treated separately in Banning coffee.

Two things are born in these rooms that we forget to count. The first is printed advertising: the handbill of Pasqua Rosée, The Vertue of the Coffee Drink, distributed at the opening of his shop in St Michael's Alley in 1652, is the first printed advertisement for coffee, and the first advertisement in a London newspaper follows in 1657. Coffee and the commercial press are exactly contemporary, and each needs the other: an advertisement presupposes a sheet, a sheet presupposes a room where it can be read aloud.

The second is more material. After the civil war, England runs short of small change; the coffeehouse keepers then strike their own tokens, bearing the effigy of Morat the Great or of Suleiman, and these tokens circulate as small change until 1675. James Farr, barber and keeper of the Rainbow, strikes one of the first after the great fire of 1666, a rainbow coming out of the clouds. A business whose tokens are accepted by the neighboring shops is a business whose credit is good in the district. What was to be played out at Lloyd's and at Jonathan's, in 1688, was already contained in that bit of brass.

What these rooms founded is told in The room where it all began, and there is no point in repeating it here: the Oxford club that becomes the Royal Society, Harrington's Rota and its first ballot urn in 1659, Edward Lloyd's shipping lists, the market of the stockjobbers of Change Alley. What must be retained for the rest of the century lies elsewhere, and it is a question of knowledge.

While London builds an exchange in a coffeehouse, no one in Europe knows where what is drunk there grows. In 1685, Dufour writes calmly that coffee grows only in Arabia, without cultivation, and nowhere else. He has been wrong for twenty-seven years: the Dutch have been planting in Ceylon since 1658, and will carry plants from Malabar to Java between 1696 and 1699. The century that invented the coffeehouse was ignorant of the geography of its own drink.

Finally, we must say what we do not know, for this century is the one in which the legends still repeated today are fabricated. Pope Clement VIII tasting coffee and baptizing it to rescue it from the infidels: Ukers himself gives it as a widespread legend, and no known pontifical document carries it. Kolschitzky receiving the sacks abandoned by the Ottomans after the siege of Vienna in 1683 and opening the first coffeehouse of the city: the story was written in 1783 by Gottfried Uhlich, a century after the events, and Karl Teply dismantled it in 1980; the document, for its part, exists, it is the privilege of January 17, 1685 granted to the Armenian merchant Johannes Diodato.

The seven seeds of Baba Budan, brought back from Mecca in a belt, float between 1600 according to Ukers and 1695 according to others, and nothing allows a decision. As for the tip, which the coffeehouses of London are said to have invented with boxes marked To Insure Promptness, it is an etymology that Ukers reports and that the Oxford English Dictionary rejects. The century ends on two monopolies that face each other without seeing each other: that of Yemen, intact, and the one that France grants in 1692 to Damame François, a bourgeois of Paris, on the sale of coffee and tea throughout the kingdom for ten years.

Neither will survive the next twenty-five years, and for a reason no one saw coming: an earthen pot in a botanical garden in Amsterdam.

1755Lisbon earthquake1756Start of the Seven Years' War1769Watt patents his steam engine1776Declaration of Independence of the United States1789Storming of the Bastille

The century begins with an earthen pot and ends with an insurrection. In 1706, a single plant leaves Java for the botanical garden of Amsterdam; almost all the Typica in the world descends from it. In 1791, the enslaved people of Saint-Domingue revolt, and the world's leading coffee production disappears in a few months. Between the two, coffee changes nature: it is no longer a commodity bought from a foreign empire, it becomes a crop that one sets up at home, on seized land and with bought hands. What changes is not botany, it is the regime of ownership of labor.

The series of transplantations is told in detail in The escapes, and it is enough to retain its rhythm and degree of certainty. On July 29, 1714, Antoine de Jussieu examines at the Jardin du Roi the coffee plant offered by Amsterdam. Then, in twenty-two years: Surinam in 1718, Pará in 1722, Gabriel de Clieu's Martinique in 1723, Saint-Domingue in 1725, Brazil in 1727, Jamaica in 1730.

The dates of arrival and the first harvests are documented; the way of telling them much less so. Clieu sharing his water ration with his plant under a bell jar comes from his own late account, which Ukers takes up and which everyone takes up after him; the fact that he carried a plant is not in question, the scene of the thirsty sailor is. The bouquet of the wife of the governor of Cayenne, in which Francisco de Melo Palheta is said to have hidden the plants of Brazil in 1727, is a Brazilian tradition, which Pendergrast reports as such, and Brazil has a good reason to prefer it to administrative truth: the official attempt of 1723, at Pará, with plants from Cayenne, had failed.

The seven seeds of Baba Budan, finally, are dated to 1600 by Ukers and to 1695 by others. These three stories come to us from books of the 19th and 20th centuries, and have been repeated ever since without anyone having found the document.

What motivated all this, on the other hand, is perfectly quantified, and it is price. The first public sale of Java coffee in Amsterdam, in 1711, covers 894 pounds knocked down at twenty-three and two thirds stuivers a pound. The Dutch Company does not wait: it then imposes compulsory deliveries on the regents of Java, that is, it does not buy the coffee, it orders it. This system of forced cultivation precedes by a century the Cultuurstelsel of 1832, and it must be set beside what is being put in place in the Americas, because they are two answers to the same problem.

Coffee demands repeated picking, pass after pass, on slopes, over several months, and no machine does this work, neither then nor today. Its cost is labor and almost nothing else. For coffee to become cheap in Europe, this labor therefore must go unpaid. In Java, it is obtained by administrative coercion on a peasantry in place. In the Americas, it is obtained by slavery.

The figures must be given and their origin stated, for they vary from one source to another and no primary accounting has been consulted here. Saint-Domingue receives coffee in 1725. On the eve of the revolt, in 1789, the colony exports on the order of 35,000 tonnes of coffee, which the old sources count in French pounds and put between 74 and 77 million; according to estimates, it supplies between half and sixty percent of the coffee consumed in the world.

The enslaved population there is estimated at around five hundred thousand people, about nine inhabitants out of ten. These orders of magnitude are those of the current historiography of the colony; the chronicle of this site relies for the turning point of 1791 on Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Motion in the System, published in Review in 1982, and on Pendergrast, Uncommon Grounds (1999), chapter one. For Brazil, the figures come from another source and with another precision: Thurber, Coffee: From Plantation to Cup (1881), gives 391,785 sacks leaving the port of Rio alone in 1830, and 1,476,567 people recorded as enslaved in Brazil in 1876. Slavery there will be abolished only in 1888, ninety-seven years after the revolt of Saint-Domingue.

A remark on the source, itself a documentary fact. Ukers's chronology, which serves as the backbone of nearly all the history of coffee written in the 20th century, contains no entry for 1791. It carefully records the opening of every coffeehouse in London and Philadelphia, coffee pot patents and American customs duties to the nearest cent, and it does not mention the event that destroyed the world's leading production and redrew the map of origins.

This silence is not an isolated oversight: it is the way the history of coffee has long been written, from the side of the consumer and the cup.

There is nonetheless, in the Saint-Domingue file, a fact that complicates the picture without excusing anything in it. Coffee does not grow where cane grows: it occupies the mornes, those hills that cane cannot exploit. A coffee plantation therefore cost much less to set up than a sugar estate, and often employed fewer than twenty-five people where a sugar estate concentrated hundreds.

The consequence, which Trouillot studied and which made the reputation of his article, is that coffee widened the class of owners: poor whites and above all freedmen, that is, free people of color, entered the plantation system by this door, to the point of holding on the eve of the revolt, according to his estimate, about a third of the properties and a quarter of the people enslaved there.

This figure must be read for what it says: coffee was not a gentler crop than sugar, it was the crop that multiplied the number of those who owned human beings.

Let us look at the European side of the same accounting, for the two halves never meet in the stories and are nevertheless the same sentence. In London, before 1715, there are two thousand coffeehouses, three thousand if we believe Dufour; at the end of Anne's reign, the taxes on tea, coffee and newspapers bring the cup to two pence.

Retail coffee is worth five shillings a pound, tea twelve to twenty-eight: it has become the cheaper of the two drinks, it that was worth five guineas a pound two generations earlier. This fall has no other cause than the plantations. Add sugar, which comes from the same islands and the same plantations, and the 18th-century European cup contains two commodities produced by enslaved people, in the same vessel.

It is because the price fell that the coffeehouse ceased to be an exceptional place and became an ordinary one, and it is because it became ordinary that it could serve for what we know: Samuel Johnson's club in 1763, the Café de la Régence where Diderot works on the nine sous his wife gives him, the Merchants' Coffee House of New York from which in 1774 the proposal of an American Union comes.

The clearest demonstration lies in one address. In 1754, in Philadelphia, the printer William Bradford opens the second London Coffee House, which the city would call its beating heart: the governor has his stall there, the gazettes are read there, and horses, goods, and men, women and children reduced to slavery are sold there at auction, on a platform set up in the street before the door.

This is not a contradiction between two eras or two continents: it is the same decade, the same sidewalk, the same customers. The rooms that produced the institutions described in The room where it all began are also these.

The rest of the century can be read from there. If Frederick II publishes in 1777 his manifesto on coffee and beer, then reserves roasting in 1781 to royal establishments, and if the Elector of Cologne imitates him in Westphalia in 1784, it is not that coffee had grown worse: it is that it now weighs on a trade balance, which is a symptom of success and not of harm; the detail of these failures is in Banning coffee.

Science catches up: Linnaeus creates the genus Coffea in 1737 in the Genera Plantarum and names Coffea arabica in 1753 in the Species Plantarum, fifty-two years after Dufour had written that the plant grew only in Arabia. And on June 5, 1792, a hundred and fifty New York merchants lay the cornerstone of the Tontine Coffee House, built from the outset to be a stock exchange.

A year earlier, the economy that filled their cups had risen up. The century had given coffee to the whole world; it had also fixed what it would cost, and who would pay for it.

1815Waterloo and the Congress of Vienna1848The Springtime of Peoples1861Start of the American Civil War1869Opening of the Suez Canal1885Berlin Conference and the partition of Africa1889Paris World's Fair and the Eiffel Tower

In 1800, coffee is sold green, by the sack, at the grocer's, and it is the buyer who roasts it in a pan. In 1900, it arrives roasted, in a package, under a brand name, with a daily quotation in New York and Le Havre and an exchange where crops that have not yet flowered are sold. Between these two states, three engines run together, and it is their simultaneity that makes the century: a machine that roasts continuously, a country that produces more than three quarters of the world's coffee, and a fungus that empties the whole Indian Ocean of its coffee trees.

Brazil first. In 1830, the port of Rio alone ships 391,785 sacks and the country becomes the leading producer. What makes this possible is not the soil but an organization of labor: coffee growing in the Paraíba valley, then on the red lands of São Paulo, rests on slavery, and Thurber still counts 1,476,567 enslaved people recorded in 1876. The Eusébio de Queirós law of 1850 closes the Atlantic slave trade; the coffee frontier thereafter buys its labor from the sugar-growing northeast, which drives up the price of a human being at the very moment when the price of coffee falls.

The Free Womb law of 1871 frees children yet to be born, the Sexagenarians law of 1885 the elderly: the enslaved population ages without renewing itself, and its value as bank collateral erodes with it. When abolition comes, it completes an arithmetic already three-quarters done.

On May 13, 1888, the Lei Áurea frees without land and without compensation. The fazendas immediately replace slavery with the colonato, a contract in which a family tends a fixed number of trees in exchange for a wage and the right to grow its food between the rows; the province of São Paulo pays the passage of Italian immigrants to bring them in. What follows is mechanical: money, hands, new plantations, and a coffee tree that takes four to five years to bear, so that the trees planted after 1888 come into production around 1896-1897 and flood the market.

Rio 7 falls to 7 cents a pound in October 1897, to around 5 cents in 1903. Everything the following century would invent in the way of valorizations, quotas and destructions answers this single overproduction, born of abolition and of the easy credit that followed it. Politically, the Republic of 1889 installs the pact known as café com leite, in which the presidency alternates for forty years between São Paulo, which holds the coffee, and Minas Gerais, which holds the milk: the planters do not pressure the state, they are the state. The plate on the economy lays out this mechanism in detail.

Ceylon next. In 1869, in the Madulsima district, the superintendent Donald Reid notices leaves that are turning yellow; on November 6, in London, the Reverend Berkeley names the fungus Hemileia vastatrix without ever having seen a diseased tree. Why could a leaf rust empty an island? Because the cultivated coffee of the whole world had come out of Yemen, where it is grown dry, far from the humid forests: a genetic bottleneck doubled by an ecological filter, which had kept the fungus at a distance for two centuries without giving the plants the slightest immunity.

The day it meets this single genotype, planted acre against acre on a cleared island, nothing stops it. The figures come from witnesses who wrote during the fall: the planted area goes from 176,000 acres in 1869 to 275,000 in 1879 while the yield falls from 4.5 to 2 hundredweight per acre, then the coffee area collapses from 68,787 hectares to 14,170 and exports, from a little over a million hundredweight around 1870, drop below 100,000 in the 1890s.

They planted more as they harvested less, not out of blindness but because each was compensating for a decline he did not control and protecting the collateral given to his bank. The plate on diseases shows this in detail.

Rust leaves Ceylon and follows shipping lines rather than winds, from Sumatra in 1876 to Usambara in 1893. The Dutch East Indies lose half of their exports between 1883 and 1887, Réunion three quarters of its production. The responses are botanical and they commit the whole following century: Hiern describes liberica in 1876, planted as a replacement for the rusted arabicas, and around 1900 Java brings in from the Congo, via Brussels, the canephora without which, McCook estimates, today's world production would be 30 to 40 percent lower.

Ceylon becomes a tea island: the roads, the ports and the capital were already there, they carried another leaf. The last effect is intellectual. London sends Harry Marshall Ward to work on the island from 1880 to 1882; he establishes the causal link between the fungus and the disease and shows that continuous monoculture sustains the epidemic. Plant pathology is born of a coffee epidemic.

The machine remained. The roaster's problem was never heating, it was always emptying. Richard Evans's English patent of 1824 already contains the finned cylinder and the probe that makes it possible to judge a roast without stopping it; but as long as the apparatus must be taken off the fire to be unloaded, one must stop, cool and start again, and so give up continuous work.

In 1864, Jabez Burns, a bookkeeper by trade, patents in New York the first roaster that no longer has to be taken off the fire: a closed cylinder, set in brickwork, in which a double screw pushes the coffee forward and unloads it without stopping anything. This is the date when roasting becomes an industry. Emmerich follows in 1868 with the firm that would become Probat, and the first direct-flame gas roaster arrives in New York in 1893. The plate on roasting tells the mechanics themselves.

What the machine changes downstream is worth more than the machine. Roasting by the tonne makes it possible to sell coffee already roasted: Arbuckle launches Ariosa in 1873, the first national packaged brand in the United States, and Thurber counts in 1881 more than a thousand roasting machines and 1,200,000 pounds a day, noting that twenty years earlier not a pound of roasted coffee was sold.

But a roasted coffee, and still more a ground one, can no longer be checked by eye. The same decade therefore sees the patenting of bean glazing, that film applied hot and filed by Pidding, Berry and then Arbuckle between 1866 and January 1868: officially to protect aroma, in practice to mask stained beans and add 5 to 6 percent of weight. And Thurber records the current American formula for a thousand pounds of goods sold as coffee: 400 of peas, 200 of rye, 200 of coffee, 100 of chicory, 100 of miscellaneous. Industrialization and adulteration are the same movement seen from its two ends, as the plate on adulteration details.

The market, finally. A futures exchange always appears at the same point of a supply chain: where a crop arrives in a single season while consumption is continuous, someone carries a stock whose value moves and seeks to insure himself. The price series says the rest: 11.04 cents a pound for current Rio in 1857, 42.5 cents in 1864 in the middle of the Civil War, a price that says as much about the depreciation of the dollar as about scarcity, 13.25 cents in September 1879.

On September 18, 1873, the day of the Jay Cooke panic, the banks stop lending, no one can finance a shipment any longer and Rio drops at a stroke from 24 to 15 cents. B. G. Arnold, who rose from accountant to coffee king, makes 1.2 million dollars in a single year, then the crash of 1880-1881 carries off 5 to 7 million and the three biggest houses in New York.

The New York Coffee Exchange and Le Havre open in 1882, Amsterdam and Hamburg in 1887. The telegraph also becomes a component of price: in 1884, a simple cable cut with Brazil prevents agents from covering their margins and drops Rio from 11.5 to 8.25 cents. The century of the kings follows this series from end to end.

Meanwhile, Europe invents the place and the apparatus: Rumford's percolator in 1806, then on May 16, 1884 the steam machine of Angelo Moriondo of Turin, the first of its kind, fifteen years before Bezzera. In the end, 1900 leaves a coherent and fragile object: one country supplies three quarters of the harvest, a single genotype almost all the arabica, a machine made the brand, an exchange made the price, and this price has fallen back to 4.5 cents. The three facts of the century will be paid for in the next.

1914Start of the First World War1918Armistice of November 111929Wall Street Crash1939Start of the Second World War1945Surrender of Japan and atomic bombs1947Independence of India

Coffee's 20th century begins with a debt. The coffee trees planted in Brazil in the euphoria that follows the abolition of 1888 all bear at once, and in 1903 Santos 4 falls to 3.55 cents a pound in New York, the lowest ever recorded. The fifty years that follow are a series of answers to a single question, and it is this that gives the period its unity: what to do when there is too much coffee.

The first answer is unprecedented, and it will be copied around the world for a century. A state buys its own harvest to withdraw it from sale: this is valorization, agreed at Taubaté in 1906. The following year yields 20,190,000 Brazilian sacks out of a world harvest of 24,307,000, and at that level selling amounts to crushing one's own price. São Paulo therefore buys above the market, but it takes 75 million dollars and the Rothschilds refuse, then all the banks of the Continent.

In August 1906, the commissioner of São Paulo travels to Baden-Baden to see the trader Hermann Sielcken, who ends up advancing 80 percent of a value reckoned at seven cents a pound. The harvest is bigger than expected: the state has to buy nearly nine million sacks, holds at the end of 1907 half of the world's visible stock, and the price barely exceeds 6 cents.

Only one remedy will work, and it is legal: ban any new planting by law. The lesson holds for the entire century, guaranteeing a floor amounts to ordering planting. In the United States, Senator Norris puts the bill at 35 million dollars a year in 1911; the 1912 lawsuit is dropped against the promise to liquidate the 746,539 sacks stored in the United States, and the Norris law of February 1913 forbids any American to take part in a valorization. The plate on the economy details the arrangement.

The second answer concerns labor. The Paulista colonato, that contract that ties a family to a fixed number of coffee trees, had attracted the Italians; the conditions imposed on the fazendas are harsh enough that Italy forbids subsidized emigration to Brazil in 1902, by the Prinetti decree. São Paulo then turns to Japan, and the Kasato Maru lands the first contract families at Santos in June 1908: the largest Japanese community outside Japan is born of a shortage of coffee labor.

Elsewhere, the same crop made the landholding structure and the political regime that goes with it. In January 1932, in El Salvador, where fourteen families hold the land and the coffee, the peasant revolt led by Farabundo Martí is crushed: the Matanza kills ten to thirty thousand people in a few weeks.

The third answer is scientific, and it is what makes up the true novelty of the period. Until then, coffee selection was a matter of a planter observing a tree finer than the others. It becomes a matter of laboratory for a precise reason, established in 1929 when Piza counts 44 chromosomes in arabica against 22 in all the other coffee species. Arabica is tetraploid, that is, it carries a double set of chromosomes inherited from an ancient natural hybridization, and it self-fertilizes.

This explains three things at once: that a mutation spotted on a single tree, like the Brazilian Caturra of the years 1915-1918, becomes fixed and multiplies as it is; that the diversity of the cultivated species is wretched; and that a cross with diploid canephora almost always fails. Hence the value of what is identified in 1927 on the island of Timor, a spontaneous arabica by canephora hybrid, tetraploid and fertile, from which almost all the rust resistance planted in the world descends today.

Institutions are built around this program: Kent selects at Mysore from 1911, the Scott Laboratories open at Kabete in 1922 and give SL28 and SL34 between 1931 and 1935, Mayne publishes in Nature in 1932 the Mendelian genetics of resistance and the existence of races of the fungus, the Instituto Agronômico de Campinas is created the same year with Krug and Carvalho, the Colombian Cenicafé in 1938; and the Indian S.795, distributed in 1945-1946, is the first widely cultivated resistant variety. The plate on diseases follows this lineage.

In passing, the period harvests what will be talked about seventy years later:

• the British collections in Ethiopia from 1931 to 1936 bring back the accession planted at Lyamungu under the name Geisha
• which will not enter CATIE until 1953 and will be tasted for what it is worth only in the 21st century. And the other answer to rust becomes an economic species: canephora
• 1900arrived in Java
• enters Espírito Santo in 1912 under the name conilon and will later make Vietnam the world's leading producer of this species, as the plate on canephora tells it.

Then come the wars, which do to coffee what they do to every commodity: they turn it into a logistics question. In 1918, the United States places importers and roasters under license; shipping tonnage is requisitioned, more than nine million sacks pile up in Brazilian ports, and Hoover has to get coffee recognized as a foodstuff in order to obtain ships. In June 1918, a very real frost strikes Paraná and São Paulo, but American buyers take it for the usual seasonal rumor and do not follow; Santos 4 goes from 8.25 cents in May to 20.5 cents on December 10, after the armistice.

The war above all invents a product. Mustard gas makes the hot drink vital at the front, instant coffee becomes one of the most important subsistence items of the American army, and the New York quartermaster requests 42,500 pounds a day from January 1919. Ukers, in 1922, still holds this instant coffee to be a will-o'-the-wisp that loses aroma.

The crash of 1929 does not merely lower prices: it destroys valorization itself, because the accumulated stock served as collateral for the loans that had financed it. Brazil then does the only arithmetic that holds, and it is terrible to read. From 1931 to 1944, 78.2 million sacks of exportable coffee are destroyed, burned at Santos, thrown into the sea, used as locomotive fuel or as landfill: the equivalent of three world harvests.

Selling them would have crushed the price that the entire operation was meant to hold. The same crash carries off the café com leite regime, and Vargas's revolution ends in 1930 forty years of alternation between São Paulo coffee and Minas milk. The practical question remains: what to do with an unsellable and perishable surplus. It is turned into something that keeps.

It is a Brazilian request that sets Nestlé to work, and Nescafé comes out of the Orbe factory on April 1, 1938. The Second World War will make it an American habit, and in 1952 the campaign of the Pan-American Coffee Bureau, Give yourself a Coffee-Break, will bring the coffee break into the language and then into labor law.

The rest of the period is read in objects, each answering a dated problem. Hills Bros packs under vacuum from 1900: coffee can now travel far from its roaster, which makes the national brand possible and in time condemns the neighborhood roaster. Melitta Bentz has her blotting-paper filter registered on June 20, 1908, against grounds in the cup.

Ludwig Roselius, a Bremen merchant who blames his father's death on excessive coffee drinking, patents between 1903 and 1908 decaffeination with steam and benzene, sold under the names Kaffee HAG and then Sanka; in 1932, General Foods ships free to thousands of American restaurants orange-necked coffee pots, the color of the package, to signal that Sanka is served here.

The message received was that here, orange means decaf, and this code has outlived the brand all over the world, as the plate on decaf tells it. Calimani gives us in 1929 the modern French press, Bialetti the Moka Express in 1933, the chemist Schlumbohm the Chemex in 1941. And it is only in 1947-1948 that Achille Gaggia markets the lever: nine bars of pressure and a crema that no one had seen. The espresso we drink is thus a postwar object, forty-seven years after Bezzera's patent and sixty-four after Moriondo's.

In 1950, everything is in place for what follows, including the dead ends. Production is overequipped, public intervention has become a habit of the state that will lead to the International Coffee Agreement of 1962, genetic resistance finally exists but will rest essentially on a single hybrid found by chance, and the colonial question remains intact: in Kenya, coffee growing has been forbidden to African peasants since 1900 and will be opened to them only in 1954, by the Swynnerton Plan.

1961Gagarin, first man in space1969First steps on the Moon1975End of the Vietnam War1989Fall of the Berlin Wall1994Mandela elected president of South Africa

Coffee comes out of the war with a dated fear: that of 1930, when Brazil produced more than the world could drink and burned its sacks on the docks. The answer after 1945 changes scale. It is no longer a state storing on its own account, but producers and consumers signing together. The International Coffee Agreement of 1962, concluded under the auspices of the United Nations, sets up the International Coffee Organization in London and assigns each exporter a share of the world market, tightened when the price falls below the target, loosened when it exceeds it.

The mechanism is detailed in the plate on the economy. What must be understood here lies elsewhere: why a consuming country agrees to pay more for its coffee than it otherwise would. The reason is political, and it dates from 1959. The Cuban revolution has just made Latin American rural poverty a matter of security for Washington, and the agreement is treated as a piece of the Alliance for Progress. Coffee becomes an instrument of the Cold War. It is this status, much more than economics, that will explain its death.

A quota is counted in bags, never in cup points. For twenty-seven years, then, the industry was paid by volume, and breeding went exactly where the money was: yield, precocity, resistance. The years around 1949 give the measure of it, with Pacas in El Salvador, Pache in Guatemala, the Catuaí cross at Campinas, the opening of the Ruiru station in Kenya, and the Icatu program launched in 1950 to pass canephora genes into arabica.

None of this was after flavor. The heaviest consequence appeared only in 1970, and at first it looked like a stroke of luck. In 1955, at Oeiras in Portugal, a laboratory devoted entirely to coffee leaf rust, the CIFC, was founded, while Coste wrote that same year, in the standard reference manual, that the disease did not exist in America. Four years later, the CIFC crossed the Timor Hybrid with Caturra: the Catimors were born, and at that date they had no market.

That market opened in 1970, when rust was detected in Bahia. The sanitary barrier built around the outbreak gave way as early as 1971, and the whole continent was now affected. The sequence that follows can be read only by holding both threads together. Kenya, struck in 1971 by an epidemic of coffee berry disease, the rot that blackens the cherry on the tree, launched the program that would yield Ruiru 11, released in 1985.

Colombia released Variedad Colombia in 1982; rust reached it in 1983. A year ahead. Honduras released IHCAFE 90 and then Lempira, and the Catimors became the basis of Central American orchards. In other words: America was saved by a plant crossed eleven years before it needed it, in an institute founded for a disease that people swore was absent. What this rescue cost in the cup would be measured only forty years later.

Meanwhile, a powder was redrawing the map. Instant coffee had existed since 1899 and Nescafé since 1938, but it changed in nature between 1963 and 1965, when Maxwell House and then Nestlé switched to freeze-drying, that is, drying by cold under vacuum: comparative measurements give 77% of volatile compounds retained, against 57% for hot spray-drying. A product that had become drinkable opened a market, and that market had a preference.

Instant coffee tolerates canephora, richer in extract and cheaper, where the filter drinker refused it. The figure that follows is the most telling of the whole period. Under the quotas, from 1963 to 1989, the ICO measured a stable average of 72.5% arabica and 27.5% canephora, and in 1990, the last year of the system, canephora was still at 27.5%. In 2013, once the market was free, it stood at 38.9%. The agreement did not only freeze the price, it froze the composition of the coffee the world drank.

Demand, for its part, was not left to chance. In 1952, the Pan-American Coffee Bureau, financed by Latin American producers, launched the campaign “Give yourself a Coffee-Break”; the break entered the vocabulary, then American collective bargaining agreements. In 1959, the Colombian federation invented, with a New York advertising agency, the character of Juan Valdez: a country acquired a brand, forty-six years before Ethiopia registered its own.

The equipment followed. Achille Gaggia marketed the lever machine and its nine bars of pressure in Milan in 1948, Faema released the E61 in 1961, from which most current machines descend, and in 1972 the Mr. Coffee replaced the percolator in American kitchens. These machines are in the preparations plate. What matters here is the commercial result: by the end of the 1970s, coffee was drunk everywhere, ever faster and ever less well.

Then an accident reminded everyone who was really in charge. On July 17 and 18, 1975, the black frost struck Paraná and killed about a billion and a half coffee trees. The price did not move right away, and that is the lesson: Brazil had stocks, and a stock is time bought. It took all of 1976 to go from one to two dollars a pound, then three months to reach three dollars.

In April 1977, the New York contract touched 339.86 cents a pound, a record that would stand until 2024. No international agreement ever moved the price in this way. The quotas, moreover, were suspended from 1972 to 1980 because prices were too high for anyone to need them: the mechanism worked in one direction only.

It is in the depths of this disorder that a word appears. In 1974, in the Tea and Coffee Trade Journal, the importer Erna Knutsen used the expression “specialty coffee” for the small lots from particular microclimates that she bought and that the mass trade did not know how to price. The word was thus born with a trader before it was born with a taster, and it first designated a commercial problem: what to do with a coffee too singular to enter a standard contract.

The Specialty Coffee Association of America was founded in 1982. Alfred Peet had opened in Berkeley in 1966; three of his admirers founded Starbucks in Seattle on March 30, 1971, and Howard Schultz bought it in 1987 to graft the Italian bar onto it. The whole vocabulary of quality was thus put in place inside a system that paid for volume.

In July 1989, this system came to an end. The quotas were abandoned for lack of agreement on how to share them out: Brazil refused to reduce its share, the consuming countries demanded more mild arabicas, and the end of the Cold War removed the motive that had led the United States to support prices. The agreements that followed, in 1994, 2001 and 2007, had no economic clause. The average price of the 1980s, around 120 cents a pound, fell to 50 cents at the turn of the century.

What this does to the countries for which coffee is the first resource is not abstract. The Max Havelaar label, launched in the Netherlands on November 15, 1988 by Nico Roozen, Frans van der Hoff and Solidaridad, had been designed in response to the fall that was beginning: it is the industry's first enforceable price floor, the one that a certified buyer has no right to go below.

In Rwanda, where coffee was the leading export, historians of the genocide count the ruin of planters after 1989 among the conditions of 1994. A variation in prices does not explain a massacre; it explains the fragility on which it took hold.

The state withdrew elsewhere too. Brazil dissolved its Instituto Brasileiro do Café in 1991; the same year, Pinhalense built the first pulped natural machine (cereja descascado, in Portuguese), for coffee pulped without fermentation that Costa Rica would popularize under the name honey. These two facts must be read together: when no one guarantees the price any longer, the producer's only room to maneuver is to manufacture a difference.

In Vietnam, the economic reform of Đổi Mới in 1986 pushed coffee toward the Central Highlands; within ten years the country multiplied its production by fifteen, almost entirely in canephora, and became the world's second-largest producer. This expansion prepared exactly the overproduction that would crush prices after 2000. The decade ends with two tiny but decisive devices: the first Cup of Excellence, in Brazil in 1999, where the price of a lot is formed in public, and the first World Barista Championship, in Monte Carlo in 2000. The century ends without an institution to set the price, and with a nascent institution to set the score.

2001September 11 attacks2008Global financial crisis2015Paris climate agreement2020COVID-19 pandemic2022Russia's invasion of Ukraine

In August 2002, in Johannesburg, the head of the International Coffee Organization, Néstor Osorio, laid out four numbers that no one has contested since. In the early 1990s, the producing countries took in 10 to 12 billion dollars for a retail market of about 30 billion. In 2002, retail exceeded 70 billion and producers received only 5.5. The composite indicator price, at 109 cents in 1998, fell below 48 cents: the lowest in real terms in a hundred years.

The cause is arithmetical: five years of surplus in a row, production growing 3.6% a year against 1.5% for demand, with Vietnam and the new Brazilian plantations as engines. The detail is in the economics plate. What must be retained is the effect: more than 125 million people then depended on coffee, and where it is the cash crop of a subsistence farm, a slump like that translates into interrupted schooling, debt, an abandoned farm, departure.

The response was not a new agreement, since no one wanted one any more. It was commercial: unable to raise the base price, the industry would sell the gap. It still had to be said what that gap was made of, and that is what 2004 produced. The Specialty Coffee Association set the cupping form that would govern scoring for twenty years, the Coffee Quality Institute launched the Q system and its certified tasters, and at the Best of Panama the Hacienda La Esmeralda presented its Geisha separately from the rest of its harvest.

A score, judges authorized to deliver it, an identified lot: nothing was missing to make a premium claimable. In 2005 came the Hario V60 and the AeroPress, which put in the drinker's hands the means to check the promise at home. The protocols are in the cup plate.

It is also at this moment that the trade gave itself a narrative. In 2002, in the Roasters Guild newsletter, the roaster Trish Rothgeb named a “third wave,” precisely about what she was observing in Norway. The term was a great success; it is worth saying what it is worth. Born in a professional bulletin, never defined by any organization, with no start date and no entry criterion, it borrows its image from the waves of feminism, which gives it an air of periodization that no study has validated.

Above all, it tells an Anglo-American story: to hold up, it must ignore postwar Italian espresso, the Japanese kissaten, those parlors where coffee is prepared to order, and the Scandinavian light roast, the very subject of the founding article. This chronicle dates the facts; it does not date the waves, for lack of knowing where to place them.

There remains the question that decides everything: does the premium exist, and how far down does it go? On the first point, the data are good. The Specialty Coffee Transaction Guide, built at Emory University, aggregates nearly 105,000 anonymized contracts and gives, for three harvests, a median FOB price of 3.48 dollars a pound, with 4.18 dollars for coffees scored 84 points and above against 2.93 for those from 80 to 83.9. The premium is real and measured.

On the second point, we do not know. The FOB price is that of coffee loaded onto the ship; what the producer receives, once the local intermediaries and the processing are paid, is often less than half of that amount. Direct trade has neither a shared definition nor an audit. Auctions, the only mechanism where the price is formed in public, concern a few hundred kilos, whereas the Coffee Guide counted 130.7 million bags of standard coffee against 10.8 million of specialty, one bag in sixteen.

Whether the value created at the top flows back to the producer or stays with new intermediaries has not been established: no one publishes the series that would settle it.

Two series, however, say something, and in the wrong direction. In France, the BASIC study compared the averages for 1994-1997 and 2014-2017: the new value created by coffee drunk at home went, at 1,177 million euros a year, to roasting and distribution, and at 64 million to the upstream, producers and traders combined. Four percent. And format decides everything: on a pack of ground coffee, the producer's share ranges from 11.6% in Peru to 24.1% in Colombia; on a portioned coffee, it falls between 2.7 and 4.8%. The more sophisticated the packaging, the more the grower's share melts away, at the very moment when the industry's narrative promises the opposite.

The 2023 Coffee Barometer adds the second finding: coffee income remains at or below the living income threshold in eight of the ten largest producing countries. See the economics plate, on the distribution of value and on minimum prices.

Labels run into the same wall. For the 2019-2020 season, 55% of world production met a voluntary sustainability standard, and only 25% of that volume was bought as such. Three quarters of certified coffee is thus sold as ordinary coffee, on the terms of ordinary coffee. In 2005, Ethiopia had tried another path by registering the names Sidamo, Harar and Yirgacheffe as trademarks, registered in the European Union between 2006 and 2008: unable to set the price, it tried to own the name.

Then the climate catches up with the price, by a path that the timeline alone does not show. From 2008, the Big Rust ravaged Central America and the Andean region: Colombia lost 33% of its harvest, El Salvador 57%, Mexico 46%, and 373,585 workers were displaced. Varieties reputed to be resistant fell. The epidemic has meteorological causes, but it also has an economic cause, ten years older: during the slump of 2001 to 2004, trees were no longer pruned, fertilized or renewed, for lack of money.

When the fungus arrived, the orchard was old and weakened. The peak of 2011, above three dollars a pound for the first time since 1977, did not have time to repair that. A price crisis becomes an epidemic a decade later: this is the costliest causality of the period.

The response is genetic, and quickly runs into the limits of the available material. World Coffee Research, founded in 2012, launched variety trials in fifteen countries. Colombia moved to Castillo in 2005 and then to Cenicafé 1 in 2016, Kenya released Batian in 2010, and Starmaya, the first first-generation hybrid sold as seed, came out in 2017. The same year, Lempira lost its resistance in Honduras: a resistance is not a property, it is a loan that the fungus calls in.

The root of the problem has been measured: in Brazil, 97.55% of cultivars descend from Typica and Bourbon. A continental orchard built on two lineages defends itself poorly. And the solution used since 1959, the introgression of the Timor Hybrid, that is, the lasting insertion of canephora fragments into the arabica genome, was mapped in 2024, and its quality penalty described in 2026. Resistance therefore has a price, paid in the cup. See the F1 hybrids.

The rest comes down to a few facts that seem contradictory. In 2019, Davis and his coauthors established that 60% of the 124 wild Coffea species are threatened with extinction, just as C. stenophylla, which tolerates heat, was being rediscovered in Sierra Leone. In 2023, the European Union adopted the regulation against imported deforestation, which will require geolocation of plots for coffee produced by 12.5 million farms, many of which have never had coordinates; its application has been postponed.

On February 11, 2025, arabica reached 440.85 cents a pound in New York, the highest in the entire history of the contract, on a frost and a drought in Brazil and stocks at their lowest; in August, a Best of Panama lot sold for 30,204 dollars a kilo. The same year, the USDA announced a record production of 178.8 million bags. A market can break its price record and its volume record in the same year, because the price looks at stocks and at the weather that has been, never at the harvest to come. See economics and what comes next.

What the period produced comes down to a tension, which is better stated than resolved. Coffee sells for more than ever, the measurement of its quality is finer than ever, and we still do not know what the producer gets out of it, for lack of a long series on income at the farm gate. The only solid figure on this point comes from Peru and Ethiopia: in 2017, a producer's coffee income there was 20% lower than in 2005 in constant currency, and below the poverty line in every year but one.