General knowledge · Food & drink

Coffee

Cultivated in Yemen by the 15th century; in London from 1652

Food and drink — the bean, the house and the exchange

A brewed drink made from the roasted seeds of a tropical shrub of the genus Coffea, of which two species matter commercially: arabica, milder and more valuable, and canephora or robusta, harsher, hardier and higher in caffeine. The plant is native to the Ethiopian highlands, where legend gives its discovery to a goatherd named Kaldi; its use as a drink is first documented among Sufis in fifteenth-century Yemen. The houses that sold it in seventeenth-century London were nicknamed penny universities, and two of them, Edward Lloyd's and Jonathan's, grew into Lloyd's of London and the London Stock Exchange.

How to spot them

▸Two species that matter: one mild and expensive, one harsh, hardy and twice as caffeinated
▸An Ethiopian goatherd whose animals would not sleep
▸Penny universities; Lloyd's and the Stock Exchange both began in one
▸The seeds are stones of a fruit, misleadingly called cherries
▸Brazil first for production, Ethiopia the botanical homeland

Key facts

A goatherd named Kaldi noticed his animals capering after eating the berries of a shrub

The origin legend, set in the Ethiopian region of Kaffa, from which the name may come.

Sufi orders in fifteenth-century Yemen drank it to stay awake through night devotions (1450)

The earliest documented use as a beverage; the port of Mocha gave its name to a style and a bean.

A penny bought admission, a dish and the conversation; Charles II tried to suppress them in 1675 (1675)

The London houses, nicknamed penny universities. The proclamation was withdrawn within days.

Edward Lloyd's house in Tower Street became the world's great insurance market (1688)

Lloyd's of London. Jonathan's in Change Alley became the London Stock Exchange.

Ludwig Roselius patented a decaffeination process in 1903 and sold the result as Kaffee HAG (1903)

Sold in France as Sanka, a contraction of sans caféine.

Nestlé launched a soluble powder in 1938, developed to use up a Brazilian surplus (1938)

Nescafé; it became a staple of American army rations in the Second World War.

Named for the hooded brown habit of a Capuchin friar

Cappuccino. Latte macchiato means 'stained milk'; espresso means 'pressed out', not 'fast'.

A leaf-rust epidemic from the 1860s destroyed Ceylon's plantations and turned the island over to another crop (1869)

Hemileia vastatrix — the reason Sri Lanka grows tea.

Key ideas

Arabica is a natural tetraploid hybrid of two other Coffea species and is self-pollinating, which makes its gene pool unusually narrow and the crop unusually vulnerable to disease and warming.

Quick-fire facts

•Coffea arabica accounts for roughly 60 per cent of world production and Coffea canephora, robusta, for most of the rest
•Robusta contains roughly twice the caffeine of arabica and is the usual base of instant coffee and of Italian espresso blends
•The first documented drinking is among Sufi communities in Yemen in the fifteenth century; the port of Mocha was the original export point
•England's first house opened in Oxford around 1650 and London's in 1652, in St Michael's Alley, Cornhill
•Charles II issued a proclamation to suppress the coffee houses in 1675 as seedbeds of sedition, and withdrew it within days
•Lloyd's of London grew out of Edward Lloyd's house; the London Stock Exchange grew out of Jonathan's in Change Alley
•Brazil has been the world's largest producer since the nineteenth century; Vietnam is second, and largest for robusta
•Ludwig Roselius commercialised decaffeination from 1903, marketing it as Kaffee HAG and, in France, as Sanka
•The bean is the seed of a drupe, and processing is either 'washed' (wet) or 'natural' (dry)
•Kopi luwak is produced from beans eaten and excreted by the Asian palm civet

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Sources

Mark Pendergrast — Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World
James Hoffmann — The World Atlas of Coffee
Alan Davidson — The Oxford Companion to Food