Coffee History



Historians tend to agree that Coffee first came into vogue as a popular drink after being endorsed by the mufti of Aden, Sheik Gemaleddin Abou Muhammad Bensaid, around 1454. It appears that the drink was prepared in two ways during its early history. One form of the beverage was made from the skin and pulp surrounding the bean, and the other from the bean itself. Strong evidence suggests that early followers of Muhammad were seeking an alternative for the wine forbidden to them by the Koran. By 1510, the beverage was being drunk in Cairo. In 1554, coffee was introduced in Constantinople, where it quickly became the popular "in" drink. The Turks were each drinking as many as twelve cups of very strong coffee a day in the hundreds of coffee houses that had sprung up. The popularity of coffee drinking spread throughout the Muslim world during the sixteenth century and was then introduced into Christian Western Europe around 1615 by Venetian traders. Responding to complaints concerning "Satan's Drink", Pope Clement VIII is said to have sampled coffee and found it so delicious that he solved the dilemma by baptizing it and making it a truly Christian beverage. The use of coffee spread rapidly across western Europe. The coffee houses of London (2,000 of them by 1715) started out as gathering places for the commoners. Soon, however, they became highly elite social clubs for the aristocracy and intellectuals.
It remained for America to become the world's centre of coffee drinking. The first man to bring the knowledge of coffee to North America was Captain John Smith, leader of the first permanent European settlement, located in the colony of Virginia. Captain Smith had become familiar with coffee during his earlier travels in Turkey. By the early years of the eighteenth century Boston, New York and Philadelphia had popular coffee houses. By mid-nineteenth century, Norfolk, Chicago, St. Louis and New Orleans also had coffee houses that were centers of social and intellectual life. Nevertheless, the colonists were primarily tea drinkers until King George III instituted the Stamp Act in 1766. In 1773, the colonists carried out the Boston Tea Party in retaliation against a new tax on tea and other commodities. Tea immediately became an unpatriotic drink.