The International Coffee Organization a short time back announced that 54% of Americans age 18 and older drink coffee every day. The U.S. thus spends $40 billion on coffee each year. I know I've had my share.
Yet the history of coffee does not seem to be much known. We should, for instance, pay respect to the unknown herder in present-day Ethiopia who first noted this wild bean's effect on his goats. And we might learn that the nickname "mocha" comes from the Yemeni port city on the Red Sea once famous for being Arabia's chief coffee export center to the world.
And we might congratulate the Dutch who, in 1616, circumvented an Arab restriction on exporting fertile coffee beans and brought the first plants to the Netherlands. They later spread their "koffie" plant to Central and South American, where today it is the continent's cash crop.
Since then coffee houses have become a fixture in most societies. Some important segments of world history have even been planned in coffee houses. The world's largest insurance company, Lloyd's of London, began life as a coffee house when Edward Lloyd was preparing lists of the ships his customers had insured. And the Boston Tea Party of 1775 was planned in one, the Green Dragon.
Around the time Europeans were introduced to coffee, they also first tasted hot chocolate, which was brought to Spain from the Americas in 1528, and tea, first sold in Europe in 1610.
In all that time has anything been found to compare?
