back
“Black as the devil, hot as hell, pure as an angel, sweet as love.” French Statesman Charles Maurice de Talleyrand’s description of the perfect cup of coffee beautifully sums up the mystery and passion surrounding this aromatic, gourmet drink.
First discovered in Ethiopia around 500BC, coffee has been consumed for over a thousand years! The coffee drinking tradition initially became popular in the Arab nations, with the first coffee houses opening in Mecca. They were luxuriously decorated establishments where music, dancing, chess and chat could be enjoyed and business was conducted. Thanks to the pilgrims who visited the holy city of Mecca, coffee drinking began to spread around the world. By the fifteenth century, coffee was regularly drunk by Muslims to provide energy during the long hours of prayer!
In 1615 Venetian merchants brought coffee to Europe through the port of Mocca. The Dutch were responsible for beginning coffee production outside Arabia. In 1690 they smuggled a plant out of Mocca and started cultivating coffee commercially in their East Indian colony of Java.
Coffee finally arrived in England in the mid seventeenth century, perhaps surprisingly in view of the Britain’s reputation, before tea. The first coffee house opened in Oxford in 1650 but only men were served and despite petitioning, access continued to be denied to women! The first tea house opened three years later. Coffee drinking became fashionable and spread rapidly and by 1700, there were three thousand coffee houses in London. Following the Boston Tea Party in 1773, when the British imposed heavy taxes, America adopted coffee as its national beverage in place of tea. Drinking coffee was an expression of freedom.
At the start of the nineteenth century, huge Brazilian harvests turned an elite indulgence into an everyday drink. It took until 1901 before Satori Kato invented the first soluble instant coffee however. Global coffee production is now just over seven million tonnes per year, making it the second placed commodity in terms of dollar volume behind oil. It is the world’s second most popular drink after water, with two billion cups being consumed around the globe on a daily basis! Seven thousand million cups of coffee are served in Britain each year, that’s around seventy million cups per day!
Your basket is empty.
£0.00Total: