Coffee

• 1. Introduction

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  Coffee is a beverage brewed from roasted, ground coffee beans, darkly colored, bitter, and slightly acidic. It carries a stimulating effect on humans, owed mostly to its caffeine. Yet behind that morning cup sits a global commodity worth $495.50 billion as of 2023. In that same year Brazil grew 31% of the world's coffee beans, with Vietnam trailing as a secondary producer. Here is the puzzle this documentary follows. Coffee sales reach billions of dollars every year, and over 100 million people in developing countries depend on it for their primary income. But the farmers who grow it disproportionately live in poverty. How did a drink first sipped by Sufis in 15th-century Yemen become a commodity traded under ticker symbols on global exchanges? Why did kings outlaw it, popes bless it, and goatherds become its legends? And how does a single bush, native to the highlands of Ethiopia, end up cultivated across more than 70 countries between the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn?

• 2. Goatherds And Gabriel

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  Kaldi, a 9th-century Ethiopian or Arab goatherd, is said to have noticed his flock grow energized after chewing on the coffee plant. The story is almost certainly apocryphal. It does not appear before 1671, when Antoine Faustus Nairon, a Maronite professor of Oriental languages, told it in a printed treatise on coffee published in Rome. In that earliest version the herder is unnamed and tends a camel or goat in the Kingdom of Ayaman. The name Kaldi seems to be an invention of the twentieth century, grafted onto an old tale.

  Ralph S. Hattox records a different tradition, one in which the Angel Gabriel introduced the Islamic prophet Muhammad to a stimulating beverage, recommending it for its restorative qualities. A third legend follows a Sheikh Omar, exiled and starving after leaving Mokha. Omar found berries, tried to chew and roast them, then boiled them, and the resulting liquid revitalized and sustained him. None of these accounts carry evidence. They are origin myths, repeated and embroidered long after coffee drinking had already taken root among real communities along the Red Sea.

• 3. The Yemeni Beginning

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  By the late 15th century, coffee drinking was well established among Sufi communities in Yemen, who used it to stay awake for their religious rituals. The earliest credible reports of the practice point to the Sufis of southern Arabia in the middle of that century, in regions such as Aden, Mocha, and Zabid. There the seeds were first roasted and brewed in a way close to how it is prepared now, recorded in the accounts of Ahmed al-Ghaffar.

  The earliest possible medical references reach back further, to al-Razi's 10th-century al-Hawi and Avicenna's 11th-century The Canon of Medicine. Both describe a plant component called bunchum as hot and dry. Al-Razi reported benefits for the stomach, while Ibn Sina added claims for the skin and body odor. Later accounts, though, say bunchum came from a root rather than from coffee beans, and no confirmed evidence places coffee as a drink before the 15th century.

  Abd al-Qadir al-Jaziri of Ottoman Iraq compiled a history of coffee and its legal controversies in 1587. He wrote that the bean originated in the land of Sa'ad ad-Din, the country of Abyssinia, and the land of the Jabart, though he admitted that the time of its first use was unknown. He also asserted that coffee reached Cairo at the start of the 16th century, carried by Sufi devotees. In 1542, a Portuguese crew met a ship from Zeila carrying clarified butter and coffee to Al-Shihr in Yemen, a small scene of the trade that would soon span continents.

• 4. A Christian Beverage

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  Pope Clement VIII declared coffee a Christian beverage in 1600, brushing aside appeals to ban what critics called the "Muslim drink." That blessing opened Europe to it. Coffee had spread across the Middle East and North Africa by the 16th century, and within the Ottoman Empire the first coffeehouse opened in 1555 in Tahtakale, Istanbul. Because Tahtakale lies west of the Bosporus, that establishment was likely the first coffee house in Europe.

  Leonhard Rauwolf, a German physician, described the drink in 1583 after a ten-year trip to the Near East. He called it a beverage as black as ink, useful against numerous illnesses, especially those of the stomach, taken in the morning from a porcelain cup passed around so each drinker takes a cupful. The fruit, he noted, came from a bush called bunnu.

  Thriving trade carried coffee from the Ottoman Empire to Venice, where the first European coffeehouse outside Ottoman lands opened in 1647. In England, John Evelyn recorded tasting the drink at Oxford in a diary entry of May 1637, where it had been brought by Nathaniel Conopios of Crete, a student of Balliol College. Oxford's Queen's Lane Coffee House, established in 1654, still exists today. Coffee reached France in 1657, and arrived in Austria and Poland after the 1683 Battle of Vienna, captured from the supplies of the defeated Turks.

• 5. Empire And Enslavement

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  The Dutch East India Company was the first to import coffee on a large scale, later growing the crop in Java and Ceylon. The first exports of Indonesian coffee from Java to the Netherlands occurred in 1711. Up to the end of the 17th century, though, Yemen remained the world's main producer, and Mocha was the largest shipping port for coffee, after the crop surpassed the global spice trade.

  Gabriel de Clieu carried a coffee plant to the French territory of Martinique in the 1720s. Much of the world's cultivated arabica coffee descends from it. The plant thrived and was conveyed across the Americas. In Saint-Domingue, now Haiti, coffee was cultivated from 1734, and by 1788 the colony supplied half the world's coffee. The conditions endured by enslaved people on those plantations were a factor in the Haitian Revolution, after which the coffee industry there never fully recovered.

  North America took to coffee slowly during the Colonial period, since alcoholic beverages stayed more popular. The Revolutionary War changed that. Demand rose so sharply that dealers hoarded scarce supplies and raised prices, a shift driven also by reduced tea from British merchants and a resolve among many Americans to avoid tea after the 1773 Boston Tea Party. Across the Atlantic, coffee consumption in Britain declined through the 18th century, giving way to tea, which was simpler to make and cheaper after the British conquest of India.

• 6. Brazil Takes The Crown

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  Brazil went from essentially no coffee exports in 1800 to becoming the world's largest producer by 1852. The crop had been introduced there in 1727, but cultivation gathered momentum only after independence in 1822. Market volatility around 1830 pushed Brazilian entrepreneurs to shift their attention from gold to coffee, and massive tracts of rainforest were cleared for plantations, first near Rio de Janeiro and later São Paulo.

  Approximately 7000 km of railroads were commissioned between 1860 and 1885, infrastructure that enabled the importation of workers for the enormous labor demand. The yields climbed steeply. São Paulo produced 1.2 million bags in 1880, 2.6 million in 1888, and 8 million bags in 1902, by which point coffee made up 63% of the country's exports. The state drew immigrants seeking better economic chances in the early 20th century, mainly Portuguese, Italian, Spanish, German, and Japanese nationals. São Paulo received roughly 733,000 immigrants in the decade before 1900, against about 201,000 in the six years to 1890.

  Between 1910 and 1920, Brazil exported around 70% of the world's coffee, while Colombia, Guatemala, and Venezuela together exported 15%, and Old World production fell below 5% of world exports. Many Central American countries took up cultivation in the latter half of the 19th century, almost all marked by large-scale displacement and exploitation of indigenous people. Costa Rica stood as the notable exception, where a lack of ready labor prevented large farms and left smaller, more egalitarian holdings that eased unrest.

• 7. Two Beans, Many Pests

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  C. arabica and C. canephora, the latter predominantly the form known as robusta, are the two main species commercially cultivated. Arabica is native to the southwestern highlands of Ethiopia, the Boma Plateau in southeastern Sudan, and Mount Marsabit in northern Kenya, and it is the more highly regarded. About three-quarters of the coffee grown worldwide is C. arabica. Robusta tends to be bitter with less flavor but a better body, and it carries about 40 to 50 percent more caffeine. The robusta strain was first collected in 1890 from the Lomani River, a tributary of the Congo River, then carried from the Congo Free State to Brussels to Java around 1900.

  All coffee plants belong to the family Rubiaceae, evergreen shrubs or trees that may reach 5 m tall when unpruned. Clusters of fragrant white flowers bloom simultaneously, followed by oval berries about 1.5 cm across. The berries start green, ripen to yellow, then crimson, before turning black on drying. Each usually holds two seeds, though 5 to 10 percent hold only one, called peaberries. Arabica berries ripen in six to eight months, robusta in nine to eleven.

  Over 900 species of insect have been recorded as pests of coffee crops worldwide, more than a third of them beetles. The 2-mm-long coffee borer beetle, Hypothenemus hampei, is the most damaging, destroying up to 50 percent or more of the berries in most coffee-producing countries. The adult female nibbles a single hole in a berry and lays 35 to 50 eggs, and the offspring grow, mate, and emerge to repeat the cycle. Pesticides mostly fail because the juveniles hide inside the berry, but birds catch them on emergence. The American yellow warbler, rufous-capped warbler, and other insectivorous birds have been shown to halve the number of borers in Costa Rica plantations.

• 8. From Bush To Cup

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  About 140 L of water, on average, are needed to grow the coffee beans for a single cup. Producing 1 kg of roasted coffee in Africa, South America, or Asia requires 26400 L. Coffee is often grown in countries facing water shortage, such as Ethiopia, and starting in the 1970s many farmers switched from shade-grown methods to sun cultivation, which ripens berries faster and lifts yields but demands clearing trees and heavier use of fertilizer and pesticides.

  The roasting of green coffee begins in earnest when the temperature inside the bean reaches approximately 200 °C. Caramelization breaks down starches into simple sugars that brown and darken the bean. Caffeol, one of the oils, is created at about 200 °C and is largely responsible for coffee's aroma and flavor. Notably, the difference in caffeine between a light roast and a dark roast is only about 0.1 percent. Sucrose is rapidly lost and may vanish entirely in darker roasts.

  The espresso method forces hot pressurized water, typically at 9 bar, through finely ground coffee, producing a concentrated drink topped by a reddish-brown foam called crema. Steamed milk turns it into a caffè latte, equal parts steamed milk and froth make a cappuccino, and these milk treatments can be poured into decorative surface patterns known as latte art. Among the strangest products is kopi luwak, made from berries eaten by the Asian palm civet and harvested from its feces, with bean prices reaching $160 per pound. In Thailand, black ivory coffee beans pass through elephants and sell for up to $1,100 a kilogram, three times costlier than civet beans and the world's most expensive coffee.

  King Charles II of England briefly outlawed coffeehouses to quell perceived rebellion. King Frederick the Great banned coffee in Prussia, worried about the cost of importing it without production colonies, and Sweden prohibited it in the 18th century for the same reason. Within the Islamic world, the drink's permissibility was debated in the early 16th century, permitted or prohibited in turn until it was accepted by the 1550s. Ashkenazi Jews contended over whether coffee suited Passover until it was certified kosher in 1923, and Ethiopian Orthodox Christians avoided it, owing to its association with Muslims, until the end of the 19th century.

  The coffee break originated in the late 19th century in Stoughton, Wisconsin, with the wives of Norwegian immigrants, and the city still marks it with the Stoughton Coffee Break Festival. In 1951, Time noted that since the war the coffee break had been written into union contracts. The term spread through a Pan-American Coffee Bureau ad campaign of 1952 that urged consumers to give themselves a coffee break and get what coffee gives them.

  Johann Sebastian Bach composed the humorous Coffee Cantata about coffee addiction, a subject that stirred controversy in the early 18th century. In the United States the drink is sometimes called a "cup of Joe." One common story credits US Secretary of the Navy Josephus "Joe" Daniels, who banned alcohol on navy ships and left black coffee as the strongest drink aboard. That tale may be apocryphal, since its first written account appeared in 1930, about 15 years later. Other explanations trace the name to jamoke, a shortening of mocha java, or simply to coffee as the drink of the average Joe. The Oromo people held a stranger belief still, customarily planting a coffee tree on the graves of powerful sorcerers, sure that the first bush sprang from the tears their god of heaven shed over a dead sorcerer's corpse.