The History Of The Coffeehouse

The first coffeehouse the world had ever seen was founded in Constantinople, just becoming Istanbul in 1475. It was such a huge success that right after it opened, two more appeared. So began a fascination with coffee that would last 300 more years. The reason the first coffeehouse did not open in, say, England, was location. Since Turkey was only a quick sail away from the original brewer of coffee, Arabia, traders could get the coffee to the city with minimal effort. The Europeans were completely out of the coffee trading loop until coffee began to make it's way into the hands of Venetian traders, leading the Italians to be the first Europeans to found coffeehouses. Slowly, coffeehouses came to open in England as well, the first opening in 1652. However, there was still the problem of transporting all that coffee from Turkey or the Middle East, a costly business. This problem was solved when the Turks, defeated in battle, left sacks upon sacks of the flavorful beans behind in parts of Europe. This created an abundance of coffee houses in Vienna, where there was large amounts of this left-behind coffee. Eventually, the storehouses began to run low on coffee, now very much in demand with the Europeans.

You may be wondering, why didn't they just grow some coffee? First of all, the merchants who sold the beans knew this, and sold the beans in non growing conditions (such as already ground up.) Secondly, people did try to grow coffee- but on European soil, the beans that were usable floundered and died. If they managed to get usable coffee beans at all, (it was illegal to get them) you wouldn't have nearly enough to support even the smallest coffeehouse for a week. The Dutch trading companies knew all this, but they came up with a new, radical notion- why not get some beans, but grow them not in Europe but in the East Indies! So the Dutch smuggled a small amount of un ground or processed coffee beans out of the Arabian port of Mocha, then shipped them to Ceylon and the East Indies for cultivation. 30 years later, a French naval officer named Gabriel De Clieu sailed for the Caribbean island of Martinique. When he arrived, he happened to be carrying some un cultivated coffee beans. (We'll never know how those got there.) He casually sold it to the locals, unwittingly starting one of the world's largest coffee producers. By 1777, Martinique would be the home of 1920 million coffee plants. Seedlings also found their way to Brazil from the hands of a French traveler, with similar effects in 1727. By now, Europe was abuzz with coffee. It was cheap now for vendors, so the number of coffeehouses quadrupled and kept multiplying. Anybody who had a penny on them could by a cup of coffee. This "golden age" would