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Africa365.com/Business/featured article
A history of Coffee...Continued
'Ah how sweet coffee tastes !lovelier than a thousand
kisses , sweeter far than muskatel wine ! I must have coffee...'
Johann Sebastian Bach , 1732
Coffee Cantata.
Cofee gets into Europe the future London stock exchange.
Like their eastern conterparts,Eurpean leaders found the sudden popularity of the coffee houses alarming.King Charles11 banned the coffee houses in Britain but public outcry
was so great he withdrew the ban after only 11 days.In Germany, the proclamation was made;.."our subjects and soundry
...shall upon pain of payment of a fine of five golden florins and the cnfistication of their crockery,refrain from the injurious habit of drinking cofee.
Likewise,Prussia's King Fredrick the great called coffee 'disgusting'baned it and employed 'snifers' to walk the streets and find any ilicit roasting on behind any closed doors.
However, as in Britain,the public outcry was so great he was forced to rescind his mind and reverse the ban.
but he encouraged his subjects to consider drinking beer instead.
Drink to the revolution!
Accross the Atlantic, in the American colonies,coffee received its greatest boost in 1773 when the british raised the tea tax and the colonists,in defiance of the tax,dumped all the tea into Boston habour during the famous 'Boston tea party'.Cofee was declared the national drink and the Americans ,the greatest consumers of coffee today,considered it their patriotic and revolutionary duty to drink cofee instead of tea.In Boston, the green dragon coffee house was a popular haunt for revolutionaries, and here, over endless cups of coffee, the American revolution was planned.
By the late 17th century ,coffee was a booming business in Europe, the colonies and the east.Demand was great,but supply was limited to the beans produced in Yemen.The yemenis guarded their monopoly closely -all beans were dried or boiled before being allowed to leave.-yet in the crowded marketplaces of Arabia,spies and smugglers risked execution to get their hands on a few fertile beans.Eventually,something had to slip.
One plant powers an industry
By 1690, the Dutch had managed to smuggle fertile coffee beans out of the Arabian port of Mocha and plant them in their colonies in Java and celyon.Thus the Dutch became the first European Nation to produce coffee.
Less than twenty years later,the french managed to secure a single coffee bush and plant it in the royal Botanical gardens in paris.
Some sources say the bush was a gift from the mayor of Amsterdam to king Luis XIV.-others say it was stolen-but either way,the French were now in the coffee business.This single coffee bush was to become the source of 90% of all the coffee in the world today.
In 1723,French army officer,Gabriel Mathieu de Clieu boarded a boat for the french colony of Martinique with a precious cargo in his care;a small coffee bush grown from a cutting of a plant in the Luis XIV
garden .The arduous journey was perilous for both de Clieu and his 'charge',as he called the plant.Over the course of the journey, a passenger attempted to steal the plant,breaking one of its branches in the insuing strugle;pirates attacked the boat ; and a violent storm threw the ship off the course and water was rationed-de Clieu shared his water ration with the plant to keep it alive.Eventually, the ship landed at Martinique and de Clieu planted the coffee bush in his garden with an armed guard to protect it.Cuttings from the bush were used to plant more trees, and by 1777,official Island records noted the existense of over 18 million coffee trees in the Island.
The Dutch and the French guarded their trade as closely as the Yemeni before them, but the portuguese
receieved their oportunity to enter the coffee business when they were asked to mediate a border dispute between the French and the Dutch in Guyana.During this time , a mediator, leutenant colonel de Melo palhetto initiated an affair with the governor's wife.At the collonel's farewell, the governor's wife presented him with a bouquet of flowers to thank him for his help with the dispute;inside she had hidden
an asortment of cuttings and fertile coffee beans.These beans -also decendants of de Clieu's first plant went to the Portuguese colony of Brazil to found the largest coffee industry in the world.Today Brazil-with the worlds 30% of the world's supply-is the largest producer in the world.And it all started with one fragile bush making the ardous journey from europe to Martinique.
Coffee Today
By the turn of the 20th century coffee was availabe to all who wanted it.Coffee which grows best within 1000 miles of the equator ,was a popuar crop for the equatorial colonies and in 1901,the British introduced it as a cash crop to Kenya and Tanzania.After having circumnavigated the globe,the coffee beans were back home in Africa, this time as a comercial crop.Most equatorial countries now produce Coffee.Ethiopia remains the greatest producer and consumer,while Kenya,with strict quality control,produces some of the finest and most sought after cofee beans in the world.
Today, 1.500 years after the Ethiopian shephered's first taste of the bean,coffee is an integral part of many cultures across the globe.Over the centuries,we have transformed the coffee beans to meet our ever Changing needs-Lattes,espresso,decaf and instant-but the attraction remains as compeling as it was in the 16th century.
Heather Maxwel is a writer and Photographer
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