The History of Coffee

Wild Coffea arabica in the Ethiopian forests (Hundreds of thousands of years ago)

Coffea arabica, the plant behind most of the world's coffee, is a natural hybrid of two wild species, Coffea canephora (robusta) and Coffea eugenioides. Its wild home is the highland forest of south-western Ethiopia, with a small population also found on the Boma Plateau in South Sudan. A 2024 genome study dates the founding hybrid to roughly 350,000 to 610,000 years ago and shows the species passed through several natural population crashes before anyone farmed it. That is why arabica has so little genetic diversity, and why it is so vulnerable to disease today.

Where it came from: Two coffee species crossed in the wild and doubled their chromosomes, producing a new, self-sustaining species. Its populations grew and shrank with ancient warm and cold periods, long before people arrived.

Where it is now: Arabica now supplies about 60% of the world's coffee. Even so, the wild plant is listed as Endangered on the IUCN Red List, despite an estimated wild population in the billions.

• Genome analysis puts the split between the wild and the cultivated lineages of arabica at about 30,500 years ago, long before farming began.
• The 2024 study sequenced an 18th-century specimen that Carl Linnaeus used when he named the species, alongside 39 other wild and cultivated arabica plants.
• The researchers traced the Typica and Bourbon groups, the ancestors of most modern arabica cultivars, to coffee farmed in Yemen in the 15th and 16th centuries.

Try it yourself: A jebena, the round clay pot Ethiopians still use to brew coffee (Ethiopian jebena clay coffee pot on Amazon)

Sources: Salojärvi et al., The genome and population genomics of allopolyploid Coffea arabica, Nature Genetics 56 (2024), PMC full text; University at Buffalo News: Newly sequenced genome reveals coffee's prehistoric origin story (2024); NTU Singapore School of Biological Sciences: Improving the Disease Resistance of Coffee Plants (2024); Wikipedia: Coffea arabica

The Sufis of Yemen adopt coffee (c. 1450s) (c. 1450s)

The earliest reliable trace of coffee as a drink is in mid-15th-century Yemen. Arabic tradition, preserved by the 16th-century writer al-Jaziri, credits Jamal al-Din al-Dhabhani, a mufti of the port city of Aden who died in 1470, with taking it up around 1454. Sufi brotherhoods drank it to keep alert during their night-time devotions, and from them it passed to students, craftsmen and the rest of the town. Within a few decades coffee had become a fixture of Yemeni life and was moving up the Red Sea toward Mecca.

• The French account of 1716, translated into English in 1726, says Aden's coffee drinkers gave up an older stimulant made from the leaves of a plant called 'Cat', meaning khat.
• The same account says the mufti had seen coffee drunk on a journey to Persia, tried it when he fell ill back in Aden, recovered, and then drank it with dervishes so they could pray through the night.
• The coffee plant itself almost certainly reached Yemen from Ethiopia, across the Red Sea. The Sufis drank the brew to stay awake while chanting the name of God at night.

Sources: Jean de La Roque, A Voyage to Arabia the Happy (English ed. 1726), with the treatise on the origin of coffee (Internet Archive); Oman Observer (New York Times syndication): Why Mokha, historic port that shaped the coffee trade, is a prize in Yemen's war; Saudi Aramco World: Wine in Arabia, Part 1, by Paul Lunde (1973); Wikipedia: History of coffee

The Mecca coffee ban (1511) (June 1511)

By about 1500 coffee had reached Mecca, and its coffeehouses were busy with talk, music and games. In June 1511 Khair Beg, the Mamluk official in charge of the city's markets and order, called a meeting of jurists and physicians to decide whether the drink was lawful. Under pressure from him, the assembly ruled against it, coffee stocks were burned and the coffeehouses were closed. Accounts of what followed differ: the version printed in Europe says the Mamluk sultan in Cairo, Qansuh al-Ghuri, overruled the ban and limited it to stopping disorder in coffeehouses, while a recent study of the Arabic sources says his decree upheld it. Either way, coffee kept spreading, and by the end of the century it was drunk openly in Mecca.

• According to the early account, Khair Beg first noticed coffee when he saw a group drinking it in a corner of the mosque after evening prayer and thought they were drinking wine.
• Two Persian physicians told the assembly that the coffee bean was 'cold and dry' and therefore unhealthy; one participant who claimed coffee made him drunk like wine was punished after admitting he had drunk wine.
• Penalties reported for defying the ban included about ten lashes and being paraded through the market; La Roque's version has one offender led through the streets on a donkey.

Sources: Jean de La Roque, A Voyage to Arabia the Happy (1726), account of the Mecca assembly under Khair Beg (Internet Archive); Medievalists.net: Brewing Controversy (on Reda Asaad Sharif's study in Darah journal); Saudi Aramco World: Wine in Arabia, Part 1 (1973); Wikipedia: History of coffee

Cairo's coffee quarrels (1520s-1530s) (c. 1523 to the 1530s)

Cairo, home of the great al-Azhar mosque-university, became the main stage for the argument over whether Muslims could drink coffee. Around 1523 a scholar circulated a formal question declaring coffee unlawful, but his colleagues would not sign it. About a decade later a preacher's sermons set off riots in which coffee pots and cups were smashed, and a ban is recorded in 1532. The city's chief judge then called the scholars together, who confirmed earlier rulings in coffee's favour, and the drink stayed.

• La Roque's account says the chief judge had coffee served to the whole assembly of scholars and drank some himself, which 'soon re-united all parties'.
• Coffee's defenders argued that drinking it together was no worse than the Prophet drinking milk in the company of his friends.
• One later arrest in Cairo was not for drinking coffee at all but for drinking it in public at night during Ramadan.

Sources: Jean de La Roque, A Voyage to Arabia the Happy (1726), account of the Cairo disputes (Internet Archive); Saudi Aramco World: Wine in Arabia, Part 1 (1973); Medievalists.net: Brewing Controversy; Wikipedia: History of coffee

Mocha (Mokha), Yemen's coffee port (16th to 18th centuries)

Mocha was a small fishing village until the Ottomans took Yemen in the late 1530s and built it into the outlet for coffee grown in the highlands inland. In the 17th century the English and Dutch East India Companies set up trading houses there, and the beans they shipped were sold in Europe as 'Mokha coffee'. A French expedition of 1708 to 1710 anchored off Mocha to buy coffee and described the town and its trade. The port's near-monopoly ended in the 1720s, once Europeans were growing coffee in Java and the Caribbean.

How it began: Ottoman rule turned the village into a port, and Yemen's highland farms made it the only large source of coffee in the world. Traders from India, Europe and the Middle East kept houses there.

What became of it: Java and Caribbean coffee undercut Mocha from the 1720s, and in the 19th century the British made Aden the region's main port. In recent years Mokha has been fought over in Yemen's civil war, while growers try to revive the country's coffee.

• The Ottomans banned the export of unroasted or unboiled coffee beans so no one else could grow the plant.
• The town's patron saint is Ali ibn Umar al-Shadhili, a Sufi traditionally linked with spreading coffee.
• The Dutch blended Yemeni and Javanese beans to make 'Mocha Java', often called the first coffee blend.

Try it yourself: Single-origin Yemeni beans, from the highlands that once supplied Mocha (Yemeni coffee beans single origin on Amazon)

Sources: Jean de La Roque, A Voyage to Arabia the Happy (1726), French voyage to Moka 1708-1710 (Internet Archive); Oman Observer (New York Times syndication): Why Mokha, historic port that shaped the coffee trade, is a prize in Yemen's war; National Coffee Association: History of coffee; Wikipedia: Mocha, Yemen

Istanbul's first coffeehouses (1554) (962 AH (1554-55))

The Ottoman historian İbrahim Peçevi wrote that coffee was unknown in Istanbul until the Islamic year 962, which began in November 1554. That year two men, Hakem from Aleppo and Şems from Damascus, opened large coffee shops in the Tahtakale district and served customers on comfortable sofas. Scholars, poets and players of chess and backgammon came first, then young lawyers, officials and courtiers. Imams soon complained that the mosques were emptying while the coffeehouses filled.

How it began: The Syrian merchants brought a custom already common in Arab cities to the Ottoman capital, during the reign of Süleyman the Magnificent. A cup cost about one akçe (asper), a small silver coin.

What became of it: Sultans tried several times to close them, most sweepingly Murad IV in 1633, but coffeehouses kept multiplying. Ottoman records list 1,631 in Istanbul in 1792 and 2,076 in 1821.

• Peçevi's account reached Europe through French scholars and was printed in English by 1726, naming Schems of Damascus and Hekem of Aleppo.
• Sources do not agree on the exact year: another Ottoman writer, Âlî Mustafa Efendi, dates the first coffeehouses to 1553.
• Because people read, debated poetry and watched shadow-puppet shows there, Ottoman coffeehouses were nicknamed 'schools of wisdom' (mekteb-i irfan).

Try it yourself: Ground Turkish coffee from Kurukahveci Mehmet Efendi, an old Istanbul roaster (Kurukahveci Mehmet Efendi Turkish coffee on Amazon)

Sources: İbrahim Peçevi, Tarih-i Peçevi, vol. 1 (Istanbul 1866 printing, Internet Archive); Jean de La Roque, A Voyage to Arabia the Happy (1726), English version of Peçevi's account (Internet Archive); TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi: Kahvehane, by Ahmet Yaşar; Saudi Aramco World: Wine in Arabia, Part 1 (1973)

Turkish coffee and the cezve (16th century to today)

Turkish coffee is made from beans ground to a very fine powder, heated with cold water, and sugar if wanted, in a small long-handled pot called a cezve (or ibrik). It is brought slowly up to the point of foaming, poured unfiltered, and the grounds settle at the bottom of the cup. It is served in small cups with a glass of water. In 2013 UNESCO added Turkish coffee culture and tradition to its list of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.

How it was made: The method grew up with the Ottoman coffeehouses of the 16th century, which spread coffee drinking across the empire.

Where it is now: It is still made daily across Turkey, the Balkans and the Middle East. UNESCO's 2013 listing describes it as a symbol of hospitality and friendship, and as part of engagement ceremonies and holidays.

• The grounds left in the cup are often turned over and read to tell a person's fortune, a practice UNESCO's listing mentions.
• One traditional method heats the cezve in a tray of hot sand rather than over a flame, which lets the coffee foam quickly and evenly.
• Because the sugar goes into the pot with the coffee and water, drinkers say how sweet they want it before it is made, not afterwards.

Try it yourself: A copper cezve, the long-handled pot for brewing Turkish coffee (copper Turkish coffee pot cezve on Amazon)

Sources: UNESCO Intergovernmental Committee, Decision 8.COM 8.28 (Baku, 2013): Turkish coffee culture and tradition; UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage: Turkish coffee culture and tradition; TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi: Kahvehane; Wikipedia: Turkish coffee

Leonhard Rauwolf describes 'Chaube' (1573-1582) (Seen 1573-75, printed 1582)

Leonhard Rauwolf was a physician and plant collector from Augsburg who travelled through Syria and Mesopotamia between 1573 and 1576. In Aleppo he saw people drink 'Chaube' in the early morning in public, sipping it as hot as they could from porcelain cups and passing it round. He also described the berries it was made from, which locals called 'Bunru'. His travel book, printed at Lauingen in 1582, is generally credited as the first European description of coffee.

How they rose: Rauwolf left Augsburg in May 1573, sailed from Marseille to Tripoli in Syria and spent months in Aleppo before going on to Baghdad and Jerusalem. He collected plants throughout and returned home through Venice in early 1576.

How they died: He died in 1596 at Vác in Hungary while on campaign with the imperial army against the Ottomans. His herbarium of about 972 pressed plants in four volumes survives in Leiden University Library.

• Rauwolf praised the drink as 'very good in illness, chiefly that of the stomach'.
• He compared the coffee berry with plants named by the medieval physicians Avicenna and Rhazes and took them to be the same, 'until I am better informed by the learned'.
• He noticed that drinkers put the cup often to their lips but took only a little at a time, letting it go round as they sat.

Try it yourself: Small porcelain coffee cups like the ones Rauwolf saw passed round in Aleppo (porcelain Turkish coffee cups set on Amazon)

Sources: Leonhard Rauwolf's Travels, in John Ray, A Collection of Curious Travels & Voyages, vol. 2 (1738 ed., Project Gutenberg); Neue Deutsche Biographie: Rauwolff, Leonhard (Deutsche Biographie); Saudi Aramco World: Wine in Arabia, Part 1 (1973); Wikipedia: History of coffee

Jacob's coffeehouse at the Angel, Oxford (1650/51) (1650 or early 1651 (disputed))

The Oxford antiquary Anthony Wood recorded that 'Jacob a Jew opened a coffey house at the Angel' in the parish of St Peter-in-the-East, on the High Street. Wood's editor dated the entry to 1650, or early 1651 by modern reckoning, since Wood's year ran to 24 March. The date is not certain: Wood's earlier draft says coffee was drunk by some people in Oxford in 1650 but first sold publicly at the Angel, with chocolate, in 1654 or 1655, and the historian Markman Ellis doubts the earlier date. Jacob's house is still usually counted as the first coffeehouse in England, ahead of London's in 1652.

How it began: Jacob sold coffee at the Angel coaching inn. Within a few years others followed: Cirques Jobson, described by Wood as 'a Jew and Jacobite' born near Mount Lebanon, sold coffee near Queen's College, and the apothecary Arthur Tillyard opened a house opposite All Souls.

What became of it: Jacob later moved to London and sold coffee in Old Southampton Buildings, Holborn; Wood notes he was still alive in 1671. The Angel ceased to be an inn in 1866, and much of its site later went to the Examination Schools. A café on the High Street now advertises itself as England's first coffeehouse, and the Queen's Lane Coffee House across the road claims to have traded since 1654.

• Tillyard's coffeehouse was backed by royalists and 'virtuosi', including the young Christopher Wren.
• Wood says that at Jacob's the new drink was taken 'by some, who delighted in noveltie'.
• Wood's earlier draft said coffee was sold at the Angel 'by an outlander or a Jew'; according to Markman Ellis, he named Jacob only in a revision of 1671.

Sources: The Life and Times of Anthony Wood, ed. Andrew Clark, vol. 1 (Oxford Historical Society, 1891), Internet Archive; Historic England list entry 1320571: 83 High Street, Oxford, part of the former Angel inn (via British Listed Buildings); Oxfordshire County Council heritage resource: Jewish culture, food (the Old Angel Inn, Oxford's first coffee-house); Wikipedia: English coffeehouses in the 17th and 18th centuries

Pasqua Rosée, London's first coffee-man (1652) (c. 1652)

Pasqua Rosée was the servant of Daniel Edwards, an English Levant Company merchant in Smyrna (now İzmir) and a heavy coffee drinker. Edwards brought him to London, and around 1652 Rosée began selling coffee from a shed in St Michael's churchyard, off Cornhill. Within a couple of years he was reportedly selling more than 600 dishes a day, though the historian Markman Ellis thinks such figures overstated. His printed handbill, 'The Vertue of the Coffee Drink', is the earliest known coffee advertisement in England.

How they rose: Edwards set Rosée up because Levant Company rules kept the merchant himself out of the trade. When local tavern keepers objected that Rosée was not a freeman of the City, Christopher Bowman, a freeman, became his partner in 1654.

How they died: Rosée disappears from the records after 1658; a story that he left over some misdemeanour has never been confirmed. The Great Fire of 1666 destroyed the shop. The Jamaica Wine House now stands near the site, marked by a plaque put up in 1952.

• His handbill claimed coffee 'groweth upon little Trees, only in the Deserts of Arabia' and promised help for headaches, coughs, dropsy, gout and scurvy.
• The shop's sign was a portrait of Rosée himself, 'the Signe of his own Head'.
• His origins are disputed: he has been called Greek, Armenian and Turkish, and one account places his birth in the Greek community of Ragusa (Dubrovnik).

Try it yourself: A brass hand mill of the kind used for coffee in the Ottoman lands Rosée came from (Turkish coffee grinder brass hand mill on Amazon)

Sources: The Vertue of the Coffee Drink, handbill by Pasqua Rosée (EEBO-TCP text, Distant Reader); The Public Domain Review: The Lost World of the London Coffeehouse, by Matthew Green; Exploring London: Lost London - Pasqua Rosee's Coffee House; Open Culture: The Vertue of the COFFEE Drink, an ad for London's first cafe; Wikipedia: Pasqua Rosée

Baba Budan and the seven seeds (legend, c. 1670) (Traditionally c. 1670)

Baba Budan was a 17th-century Sufi saint whose shrine stands in the hills of Chikkamagaluru in Karnataka. Tradition says that on his way home from the hajj, around 1670, he hid seven coffee seeds, in his beard or his clothes depending on who tells it, and planted them on the Chandradrona hills. The story is popular lore rather than documented history; the details have no early written source. The 2024 arabica genome study accepts the broad idea that Indian arabica lineages began with seeds smuggled out of Yemen, which it places around 1600.

How they rose: Coffee was guarded in Yemen, where the Ottomans banned the export of beans that could still sprout. According to the legend, Baba Budan defied that by carrying fertile seeds home.

How they died: The range where he is said to have planted them is now called Baba Budangiri, after him, and his tomb there is still visited.

• Seven is said to have been chosen because it is a sacred number in Islam.
• Coffee was known in India before 1670: the Madras Courier quotes the English chaplain Edward Terry, in Mughal India under Jahangir from 1616, describing a wholesome liquor 'they call coffee'.
• The 2024 arabica genome paper dates the smuggling of the 'seven seeds' out of Yemen to around 1600, about 70 years before the traditional date.

Try it yourself: Monsooned Malabar, India's best-known coffee, from the country Baba Budan's seeds reached (Indian Monsooned Malabar coffee beans on Amazon)

Sources: Salojärvi et al., The genome and population genomics of allopolyploid Coffea arabica, Nature Genetics (2024), PMC full text; Madras Courier: How Coffee Came To India (2017); Oman Observer (NYT syndication): Why Mokha, historic port that shaped the coffee trade, is a prize in Yemen's war; Wikipedia: Baba Budan

The legend of Kaldi and the dancing goats (first told 1671) (Story first printed in 1671)

The best-known coffee origin story tells of a herder who noticed his goats leaping about after eating red berries; monks then brewed the berries to stay awake at prayer. The tale does not appear in any source before 1671, when Antoine Faustus Nairon, a Maronite scholar teaching Syriac in Rome, printed a version in a Latin treatise on coffee; his herder kept camels or goats in Yemen. Modern retellings set the legend in 9th-century Ethiopia and name the herder Kaldi. There is no evidence for any of it, though Ethiopia is indeed where wild arabica grows.

• In the earliest printed version the herder has no name; the name Kaldi seems to have spread through William Ukers' 1922 book 'All About Coffee'.
• A different goat story, retold in a 1973 Saudi Aramco World article, credits a Sufi it calls Shaikh ash-Shadhili, not a herder, with seeing goats 'dancing about' after eating the berries.
• Nairon's book was titled 'De saluberrima potione cahue', 'On the most healthful drink cahue'.

Try it yourself: Ethiopian Yirgacheffe beans, from the country where the legend is set (Ethiopian Yirgacheffe whole bean coffee on Amazon)

Sources: Antoine Faustus Nairon, De saluberrima potione cahue, seu cafe nuncupata discursus (Rome, 1671), Internet Archive; National Coffee Association: History of coffee (the Kaldi legend); Saudi Aramco World: Wine in Arabia, Part 1 (1973); Wikipedia: History of coffee

The Women's Petition Against Coffee (1674) (1674)

In 1674 an anonymous pamphlet appeared in London, signed only 'By a Well-willer' and addressed from 'several Thousands of Buxome Good-Women'. It blamed coffee, the 'ugly Turkish Enchantress', for draining men's vigour and money and for keeping them in coffeehouses talking nonsense. It asked that coffee be forbidden to everyone under sixty and that beer and other 'strengthning Liquors' be promoted instead. It was satire rather than a real petition, and it is unknown whether a woman wrote it.

• The pamphlet calls coffee 'Puddle-water' and describes it as 'nasty, bitter, stinking, nauseous'.
• It complains that men go from coffeehouse to tavern and back, then come home too drunk or tired to be good husbands.
• It appeared the year before Charles II tried to shut every coffeehouse in England.

Sources: The Women's Petition Against Coffee (London, 1674), digital edition by Clarkson and Gloning, University of Giessen; Lapham's Quarterly: Nauseous Puddle Water (1674); The Public Domain Review: The Lost World of the London Coffeehouse; Wikipedia: English coffeehouses in the 17th and 18th centuries

The Men's Answer to the Women's Petition (1674) (1674)

The Women's Petition drew a reply the same year, also anonymous: 'The Mens Answer to the Womens Petition against Coffee'. It defended coffee as a drink that kept people sober and cheerful, saying that 'Coffee Collects and settles the Spirits'. It praised coffeehouses as places of news and learning, and turned the attack back on women, blaming their late mornings, plays and spending. Together the two pamphlets show how loud the argument over the new coffeehouses had become.

• The men called the coffeehouse 'the Wise mans Recreation' as well as 'the Citizens Academy'.
• They blamed any weakness in husbands on the wives' own demands rather than on coffee or tobacco, and pointed out that many women smoked pipes too.
• The pamphlet ends by proposing that any wife who petitions against coffee again should sleep alone and drink nothing but 'Bonny Clabber', a kind of soured milk.

Sources: The Mens Answer to the Womens Petition against Coffee (London, 1674), University of Giessen digital edition; The Public Domain Review: The Lost World of the London Coffeehouse, by Matthew Green; Open Culture: The Curious Story of London's First Coffeehouses (1650-1675); Wikipedia: English coffeehouses in the 17th and 18th centuries

Charles II's proclamation to suppress coffeehouses (1675) (29 December 1675)

On 29 December 1675 Charles II issued 'A Proclamation for the Suppression of Coffee-Houses' from Whitehall. From 10 January 1676 no one was to keep a public coffeehouse or sell coffee, chocolate, sherbet or tea by retail to be drunk on the premises, and magistrates were told to cancel every licence. The King's reasons: tradesmen wasted their time there, 'Idle and disaffected persons' gathered there, and rumours that defamed his government were made up and spread there. The outcry was so wide that the King backed down, and the coffeehouses stayed open.

• Anyone who kept selling without a licence faced a forfeit of five pounds for every month they carried on.
• The ban covered tea, chocolate and sherbet as well as coffee.
• By the early 1700s contemporaries guessed London had anywhere from 1,000 to 8,000 coffeehouses; a 1734 survey that left out unlicensed premises counted 551.

Sources: By the King. A Proclamation for the Suppression of Coffee-Houses (1675), University of Giessen transcription; Grub Street Project: ESTC R226464 record of the proclamation; The Public Domain Review: The Lost World of the London Coffeehouse; Open Culture: The Curious Story of London's First Coffeehouses (1650-1675)

Vienna's coffee: the 1683 legend and the 1685 licence (1683 (legend), 1685 (record))

During the Ottoman siege of Vienna in 1683, Jerzy Franciszek Kulczycki (Kolschitzky) slipped through enemy lines in Turkish dress to carry messages to the relieving army. The popular story says he was rewarded with the sacks of coffee the Ottomans left behind and opened Vienna's first coffeehouse. That part was largely the work of Gottfried Uhlich, who published it in a history of the siege in 1783, a century later. The first documented right to serve coffee in Vienna went in 1685 to Johannes Diodato (Deodato), an Armenian who had worked as a spy for the Habsburg court.

• The historian Karl Teply showed in 1980 that the Kolschitzky coffeehouse story was a later invention.
• A statue of Kolschitzky still stands in Vienna at Favoritenstraße 64, on Kolschitzkygasse, the street named after him.
• UNESCO Austria added Viennese coffee house culture to its national heritage inventory in 2011; women were admitted to Vienna's coffeehouses as guests only from 1856.

Try it yourself: Beans from Julius Meinl, the Viennese roaster found in the city's coffeehouses (Julius Meinl coffee beans on Amazon)

Sources: Gottfried Uhlich, Geschichte der zweyten türkischen Belagerung Wiens (Vienna, 1783), Ossolineum digital library; Österreichische UNESCO-Kommission: Wiener Kaffeehauskultur (national inventory); Kulturpool (Austria): A melange of histories; Wikipedia: Jerzy Franciszek Kulczycki

Café Procope, Paris (1686) (1686)

Procopio Cutò, a Sicilian who later called himself François Procope, had run a lemonade and coffee stall before opening his café in 1686 on what is now the rue de l'Ancienne-Comédie. He fitted out a former bath house with chandeliers, mirrors and marble tables and served coffee and sorbets to fashionable Paris. When the Comédie-Française opened across the street in 1689, actors and writers followed. In the next century it drew Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, Benjamin Franklin and, during the Revolution, Danton and Robespierre.

How it began: Procope's mirrors-and-marble interior set a style many European cafés copied. Its position facing the theatre made it a meeting place for the literary crowd.

What became of it: The original café closed in the 19th century and the space was used for other businesses. A restaurant reopened under the Procope name in 1957 at 13 rue de l'Ancienne-Comédie, so its claim to be the world's oldest continuously open café does not hold.

• The Encyclopédie of Diderot and d'Alembert is said to have been conceived at its tables.
• One of Napoleon's bicorne hats is said to have been left there in lieu of paying a bill; it is a story, not a documented event.
• An old aquatint in the Wellcome Collection shows its customers under the motto 'Notre berceau fut un caffé', 'our cradle was a café'.

Sources: Wellcome Collection: Café Procope, Paris: men and women chatting over drinks (aquatint, ref. 22048i); Bonjour Paris: Le Procope, A Slice of History at the Oldest Café in Paris (2022); Wikipedia: Café Procope

Edward Lloyd's Coffee House (1688) (First recorded February 1688/89)

Edward Lloyd ran a coffeehouse in Tower Street, near the Thames, where sea captains, merchants and shipowners came for shipping news. It is first recorded in a London Gazette notice of February 1688 (1689 by the modern calendar) offering a guinea reward for five stolen watches, to be claimed at the coffeehouse. In 1691 Lloyd moved to Lombard Street, near the Royal Exchange, and published a sheet of shipping intelligence from correspondents in European ports. Merchants who met there to underwrite ships and cargoes formed the market that became Lloyd's of London.

How it began: Edward Lloyd, born in 1648, probably came to London around 1680. Reliable shipping news made his room the place to arrange marine insurance.

What became of it: Lloyd died in 1713; the Flying Post reported the death of 'Mr Lloyd the Coffee-Man in Lombard Street'. In 1774 the underwriters moved to the Royal Exchange as the Society of Lloyd's, and Lloyd's List, begun in 1734, carried the name on.

• Lloyd briefly printed a newspaper, Lloyd's News, in 1696 and 1697.
• London Gazette notices about people who had escaped slavery named the coffeehouse as the place to return them, and Lloyd's later became one of the leading insurers of slave ships.
• Despite the name, Lloyds Bank is not connected to the coffeehouse; Lloyd's Register and Lloyd's List are.

Sources: The London Gazette, issue 2429 (18-21 February 1688), page 2: notice naming Edward Lloyd's Coffee House in Tower Street; Lloyd's of London: Edward Lloyd (historic heroes); Lloyd's of London: History; Wikipedia: Lloyd's Coffee House

Caffè Florian, Venice (1720) (29 December 1720)

Venice was among the first European cities to drink coffee, thanks to its trade with the Ottoman world. On 29 December 1720 Floriano Francesconi opened a coffeehouse in the Procuratie Nuove on Piazza San Marco called 'Alla Venezia Trionfante', Triumphant Venice. Venetians simply called it Florian's after its owner. Goldoni, Casanova and Goethe were early visitors, and later Byron, Dickens and Proust.

How it began: Francesconi's café fitted a city full of coffee shops; Carlo Goldoni's 1750 comedy 'La bottega del caffè' is set in one, on a small Venetian square, run by a coffee-man named Ridolfo.

What became of it: Florian is still open on the same site. Its rooms were redecorated in 1858, and it is generally described as the oldest coffeehouse in continuous operation in Italy.

• It was reportedly one of the few coffeehouses of its day that admitted women.
• Wounded fighters from the Venetian uprising of 1848 were treated inside the café, according to its own history.
• The idea for the international art exhibition that became the Venice Biennale is said to have been discussed at the café in 1893.

Sources: Carlo Goldoni, La bottega del caffè (1750), Italian Wikisource; Caffè Florian: History (official site); Wikipedia: Caffè Florian

Bach's Coffee Cantata (c. 1734) (c. 1734)

Johann Sebastian Bach directed a Collegium Musicum that gave regular concerts at Zimmermann's coffeehouse in Leipzig. For it he set 'Schweigt stille, plaudert nicht' (BWV 211), known as the Coffee Cantata, to a text by the Leipzig poet Picander. The grumpy father Schlendrian threatens his daughter Lieschen with every punishment he can think of unless she gives up coffee. She agrees once he promises her a husband, then quietly lets it be known that any suitor must allow her coffee whenever she likes.

• In one aria Lieschen sings that coffee tastes sweeter than a thousand kisses and smoother than muscatel wine.
• The closing trio shrugs that a cat does not give up chasing mice, and that the mother and grandmother drink coffee too.
• The narrator reveals that Lieschen wants her right to coffee written into the marriage contract.

Sources: Picander, libretto of BWV 211 Schweigt stille, plaudert nicht, with English translation (Bach Cantatas Website); Bach Cantatas Website: Cantata BWV 211; Wikipedia: Schweigt stille, plaudert nicht, BWV 211

Dutch coffee on Java (1696-1711) (1696-1711)

Coffee reached Europe from Yemen, and the Dutch wanted a supply they controlled. In 1696, urged on by Amsterdam's burgomaster Nicolaas Witsen, they shipped plants from Malabar in India to Java, where an earthquake and floods destroyed them. In 1699 Henricus Zwaardecroon brought new cuttings from Malabar, and these became the parent stock of Dutch East Indies coffee. The Dutch East India Company (VOC) made its first exports from Java to Europe in 1711. Java coffee went on to give its name, with Mocha, to one of the oldest blends still sold.

How it began: The project began at the urging of Witsen in Amsterdam; the first seedlings came from Malabar on India's coast, the second batch from the same place in 1699.

What became of it: From 1830 the colonial Cultivation System forced Javanese farmers to grow export crops such as coffee and hand them over in place of taxes. Coffee leaf rust later wiped out most of Java's old arabica, and robusta was brought to East Java in 1900; Indonesia still grows both.

• A coffee plant grown on Java reached the Amsterdam botanical garden in 1706, and in 1714 the burgomaster of Amsterdam sent a young tree about five feet tall to Louis XIV at Marly.
• The first seedlings sent to Batavia (today's Jakarta) in 1696 were lost to flooding; only the 1699 shipment survived.
• In 1860 Eduard Douwes Dekker, writing as Multatuli, attacked the Java Cultivation System in the novel Max Havelaar, whose name was later taken by the first Fairtrade label.

Try it yourself: Single-origin Java beans, from the island that gave coffee one of its nicknames (Java arabica whole bean coffee on Amazon)

Sources: W. H. Ukers, All About Coffee (1922), ch. II on coffee propagation (Project Gutenberg); National Coffee Association: History of coffee; Wikipedia: Coffee production in Indonesia

Saint-Domingue: the slave colony that grew half the world's coffee (1715-1804)

Coffee was planted in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, today's Haiti, by about 1715 (one account gives 1734), and it spread through the 1700s. By 1788 the colony supplied about half the world's coffee, and much of the coffee drunk in British North America came from the Caribbean. The work was done by enslaved Africans. A planter's manual printed in London in 1798 shows the mindset: it advised getting all the work a person could “reasonably perform” while using “every means to prolong his life”, and called punishment “sometimes necessary”. Conditions on the coffee plantations were one of the causes of the Haitian Revolution, which began in 1791.

How it began: Coffee arrived early in the 1700s, and plants from Martinique were later brought in. The estates were worked by enslaved Africans.

What became of it: By 1801 most plantations had been burned. Toussaint Louverture tried to revive output, which had fallen 45% from 1789 levels, but Napoleon's failed 1801-1803 campaign left estates abandoned again, and the colony became independent Haiti.

• P. J. Laborie's The Coffee Planter of Saint Domingo was published in London in 1798 by T. Cadell and W. Davies, in English.
• Laborie advised buying only “boys and girls of fourteen and fifteen” and setting new arrivals to work “by degrees”, treating human beings as an investment to be managed.
• Haitian coffee recovered only partly; the country was still the world's third-largest producer as late as 1949 before a long decline.

Sources: P. J. Laborie, The Coffee Planter of Saint Domingo (London, 1798), Wellcome Collection; Liberty, Equality, Fraternity (George Mason Univ.): excerpt from Laborie, 1798; NPR: But first, coffee: The drink that energized the American Revolution (2026); Wikipedia: Coffee production in Haiti

Gabriel de Clieu carries coffee to Martinique (1720s) (c. 1687-1774 (voyage 1720 or 1723))

Gabriel de Clieu was a French naval officer serving in Martinique who carried coffee plants from France to the island in the 1720s. The main account of the voyage is his own letter, printed in the Année littéraire in 1774, about fifty years later. He wrote that water ran so short during a calm that he shared his ration with the plant for more than a month, that a jealous passenger tore off a branch, and that the ship narrowly escaped a corsair from Tunis. The date is disputed: some writers give 1720, while Ukers in 1922 judged 1723 the most trustworthy. He was not the first to bring coffee to the French Caribbean, since it was already growing in Saint-Domingue by about 1715 and in Dutch Surinam by 1718.

How they rose: The plant descended from the tree that Amsterdam's burgomaster gave Louis XIV in 1714. Accounts differ on how de Clieu got a cutting from the royal garden in Paris: one says by a night raid, another says a noblewoman persuaded the royal physician to supply it.

How they died: De Clieu later governed Guadeloupe from 1737 to 1752 and founded Pointe-à-Pitre. He died in Paris at the end of November 1774 (sources give the 29th or the 30th), the year his account was published.

• In his letter he said he fenced the young plant with thorn bushes and set a guard over it until it bore fruit; Ukers's 1922 retelling notes that the guards were enslaved people.
• De Clieu wrote that his first success gave him about two pounds of seed, which he handed out to the planters he thought most capable of growing it.
• By 1777 Martinique had 18,791,680 coffee trees, according to the figure Ukers printed in 1922.

Sources: De Clieu's 1774 letter, quoted in W. H. Ukers, All About Coffee (1922) (Project Gutenberg); Modern Farmer: Old Time Farm Crime: The Coffee Spies of the 1700s (2013); National Coffee Association: History of coffee; Wikipedia: Gabriel de Clieu

Brazil's slave-grown coffee boom (1727-1888) (1727-1888)

Brazilian tradition credits Lieutenant Colonel Francisco de Melo Palheta with bringing coffee from French Guiana in 1727; the popular version, in which the governor's wife hid seeds in a farewell bouquet, is partly legend, and Ukers recorded an earlier, failed planting at Pará in 1723. The real boom came in the 19th century. Between about 1810 and 1840 the Paraíba Valley in Rio de Janeiro province was turned from forest into coffee estates worked by enslaved people, and in the 1830s it became the largest coffee exporter in the world. Brazil kept importing Africans even after an 1831 law banned the trade, until the trade was finally ended in 1850. Slavery itself lasted until 13 May 1888, making Brazil the last country in the Americas to abolish it.

• Between 1831 and 1850, while the trade was illegal, about 900,000 Africans were brought to Brazil, roughly 712,000 of them to the coffee-growing Southeast.
• In Vassouras, a leading coffee town, large and very large planters held about 70 percent of all enslaved people.
• The abolition law, the Lei Áurea, is two short articles long; its first declares slavery extinct in Brazil from the date of the law. The monarchy that signed it fell the next year.

Sources: Lei nº 3.353 de 13 de maio de 1888 (Lei Áurea), text on Wikisource; Salles and Muaze, Agrarian Empires... in a Nineteenth-Century Brazilian Coffee Zone (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2023); NPR: Photos Reveal Harsh Detail Of Brazil's History With Slavery (2013); Modern Farmer: The Coffee Spies of the 1700s (2013); Wikipedia: Lei Áurea

Jamaica Blue Mountain coffee (1728) (1728)

Coffee growing in Jamaica began after Governor Sir Nicholas Lawes introduced the crop in 1728 near Castleton, north of Kingston. The Blue Mountains region proved the best ground, and coffee from the parishes of Saint Andrew, Saint Thomas, Portland and Saint Mary can qualify for the name. Jamaica set up a Coffee Industry Board on 2 June 1950, and its 1953 regulations tied the words Blue Mountain to coffee grown in a mapped Blue Mountain area and processed at licensed coffee works. Most of it is exported to Japan.

Where it came from: Lawes's planting in 1728 started the island's coffee industry (Ukers gave 1730). The Blue Mountain label came much later, with the coffee industry law of 1948 and the board created under it in 1950.

Where it is now: The coffee is still grown, overseen since 2018 by the Jamaica Agricultural Commodities Regulatory Authority, which took over the Coffee Industry Board's work. Jamaica is a tiny producer: in 2013 it grew about 7,000 tons, roughly 0.1% of world output.

• The 1953 regulations allowed a “blue mountain blend” only if Blue Mountain coffee made up at least 20 per cent of its weight.
• Jamaica's first coffee export to Japan was three barrels of green beans, shipped to Tokyo from the Mavis Bank factory in March 1953; Japan later became the biggest buyer.
• More than 80% of Blue Mountain coffee goes to Japan, and damage from Hurricane Ivan in late 2004 caused an export shortfall the following year.

Try it yourself: Certified Jamaica Blue Mountain beans; check the label says 100%, not a blend (Jamaica Blue Mountain coffee 100% whole bean on Amazon)

Sources: The Coffee Industry Regulations, 1953 (Jamaica), via FAOLEX; Jamaica Agricultural Commodities Regulatory Authority: Coffee background; Jamaica Observer: 100 years of Mavis Bank Coffee Factory (2023); Wikipedia: Coffee production in Jamaica

The Boston Tea Party and the 'patriotic' coffee story (1773-1774) (1773-1774)

On 16 December 1773 Boston colonists dumped about 92,000 pounds of East India Company tea into the harbour. Seven months later John Adams wrote to Abigail from Falmouth that the woman of the house where he stayed had told him “we have renounced all Tea in this Place” and offered coffee instead; he said he had drunk coffee every afternoon since. The popular story is that the protest turned Americans into a nation of coffee drinkers. Historian Michelle Craig McDonald, who studied shop advertisements of the 1760s and 1770s, found coffee was already more widely available than tea, partly because it was cheaper per pound, which suggests the Tea Party was less of a turning point than the story claims.

• Coffee came to the colonies early: the first coffeehouse opened in Boston in 1676, and Boston's Green Dragon was one of the places where the Tea Party was planned.
• Harvard historian Joyce Chaplin points out that people who publicly praised coffee over tea did not always follow through; some of it was political posturing.
• The East India Company valued the tea destroyed in Boston at £9,659.

Sources: John Adams to Abigail Adams, 6 July 1774 (Massachusetts Historical Society, Adams Family Papers); NPR: But first, coffee: The drink that energized the American Revolution (2026); Wikipedia: Boston Tea Party

Kona coffee, Hawaii (1828) (1828)

Hawaii's coffee came by way of Boki, the royal governor of Oʻahu, who saw coffee culture on an 1824 visit to London and picked up about 30 coffee plants when his party stopped in Brazil on the way home. They were planted in Mānoa, and in 1828 the missionary Samuel Ruggles took cuttings from Boki's trees to the volcanic slopes above Kailua-Kona. Henry Nicholas Greenwell's Kona farm won awards at the 1873 World's Fair in Vienna, and Guatemalan seeds brought in by Herman Widemann in 1892 became the main coffee plant on Hawaiʻi Island.

Where it came from: Boki's plants, cared for in Mānoa by the English planter John Wilkinson, supplied the cuttings Ruggles took to Kona.

Where it is now: Kona coffee is still grown on about 800 small farms averaging under 5 acres. It faces new pests: the coffee berry borer was found there in 2010, and coffee leaf rust by 2021.

• Mark Twain, who rode through “the pleasant orange and coffee region of Kona” in 1866, wrote: “I think the Kona coffee has a richer flavor than any other, be it grown where it may.”
• After the coffee market crashed in 1899, plantation owners leased small plots to their workers, many of them Japanese; by 1932 Japanese families ran 959 of Kona's 1,077 coffee farms.
• Hawaiian law lets a “Kona blend” contain as little as 10% Kona coffee, and a 2019 lawsuit by Kona farmers over fake Kona labels led to settlements of more than $13.1 million.

Try it yourself: Look for “100% Kona”; a “Kona blend” can be only 10% Kona (100% Kona coffee whole bean on Amazon)

Sources: Mark Twain, Roughing It (1872), ch. LXIX, on the “orange and coffee region of Kona” (Project Gutenberg); Honolulu Magazine: Boki's Beans: A People's History of Hawaiian Coffee (2019); Hawaii Magazine: A History of Kona Coffee; Wikipedia: Kona coffee

Coffee in the American Civil War (1861-1865) (1861-1865)

The Union army issued coffee as a standard ration: for every hundred rations, ten pounds of green coffee or eight pounds roasted, which came to about 36 pounds per soldier a year. The veteran John D. Billings wrote that the coffee ration was “most heartily appreciated”. Men brewed it in tin cups and cans, and a tired soldier would drop out of the column, build a small fire, make coffee, nap and then hurry to catch up. The Union blockade cut the South off from coffee, and Confederate soldiers roasted rye, rice, sweet potatoes or beets as caffeine-free stand-ins.

• Smithsonian curator Jon Grinspan found that the word “coffee” appears in Civil War soldiers' diaries more often than “war”, “bullet”, “cannon”, “slavery” or “Lincoln”.
• Veteran John D. Billings wrote in 1887 that tea was served so rarely it hardly deserved description, and late in the war was seldom seen outside hospitals.
• Colonel Walter King had a Sharps carbine fitted with a grinder in its stock and showed it to an Ordnance Department board on 6 January 1865; the board thanked him and turned it down.

Sources: John D. Billings, Hardtack and Coffee (1887) (Project Gutenberg); NPR: If War Is Hell, Then Coffee Has Offered U.S. Soldiers Some Salvation (2016); HistoryNet: Civil War Soldiers Loved Their Coffee. So This Colonel Invented a Coffee Grinder-Gun (2022)

Coffee leaf rust destroys Ceylon's coffee (1869) (1869-1890)

In 1869 Ceylon was one of the world's biggest coffee producers, exporting more than 100 million pounds a year, when a rust fungus appeared on its trees. The fungus, named Hemileia vastatrix by Berkeley and Broome that same year, had first been recorded in 1861 on wild coffee near Lake Victoria. Exports, about 118 million pounds in 1870, were down 80 percent by 1886, and by 1890 nine-tenths of the coffee area had been abandoned. Kew Gardens sent the young botanist Harry Marshall Ward to investigate; he proved the fungus caused the disease and worked out its life cycle, but could offer planters no cure. Ceylon's planters turned to tea, and Sri Lanka is now one of the world's largest tea producers.

• Ward described the disease in 1882: small cloudy yellow spots on the underside of a leaf, which soon produce an orange-red powder of spores.
• The rust crossed the Atlantic in the 20th century, probably on the wind, and was first reported in Brazil around 1970.
• A severe outbreak between 2008 and 2013 swept Central America, Colombia, Peru and Ecuador, with yield losses of up to 35%.

Sources: H. Marshall Ward, On the Morphology of Hemileia vastatrix, Quarterly Journal of Microscopical Science (1882) (Darwin Online PDF); Talhinhas et al., The coffee leaf rust pathogen Hemileia vastatrix: one and a half centuries around the tropics (Mol. Plant Pathology, 2017); NPR: Coffee Rust Threatens Latin American Crop; 150 Years Ago, It Wiped Out An Empire (2018)

Arbuckles' Ariosa: roasted coffee in a paper bag (1873) (1865-1873)

Most Americans in the 1860s bought green coffee and roasted it at home. In 1865 John Arbuckle of Pittsburgh began selling coffee already roasted, packed while warm in small packages, despite rivals who mocked roasted coffee “in little paper bags like peanuts”. In 1868 he patented a glaze of egg and sugar that sealed the roasted beans from the air. His Ariosa brand, launched in 1873, became the first successful national brand of packaged coffee, and was later advertised as “The Coffee that Won the West”.

How it was made: The Arbuckle brothers started in the grocery trade in Pittsburgh around 1860 and opened a New York branch, run by John, in the early 1870s.

Where it is now: John Arbuckle died on 27 March 1912. The family kept the company until 1929; it closed in 1935 and its business was combined with Maxwell House. A Tucson company revived the Arbuckle name in the 1970s and still sells Ariosa.

• Each package held a stick of peppermint candy, and chuck-wagon cooks would call out “Who wants the candy?” to find a cowhand willing to turn the coffee grinder.
• Coupons in the packages could be traded for goods, from razors and scissors to clocks, wringers and corsets; Ukers counted about a hundred items on the premium list.
• The story that “Ariosa” blends the words Rio and Santos is wrong, according to Ukers in 1922: the name was simply coined.

Try it yourself: The Ariosa name lives on with a revived Arbuckle coffee brand (Arbuckles Ariosa coffee on Amazon)

Sources: US Patent 131,852 (Cooke, 1872), which cites “John Arbuckle's patent of January 21, 1868” for coating coffee (Google Patents PDF); W. H. Ukers, All About Coffee (1922), chapters on package coffee and John Arbuckle (Project Gutenberg); HistoryNet: Coffee Kings of the Old West: Folger Was First, Then Arbuckle; National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum: John Arbuckle and Coffee's Importance in the West (2026); Wikipedia: John Arbuckle (businessman)

Angelo Moriondo's steam coffee machine (1884) (1884)

Angelo Moriondo ran the Grand-Hotel Ligure and the American Bar in Turin and wanted to serve coffee faster than his rivals. On 16 May 1884 he was granted a patent for “new steam machinery for the economic and instantaneous confection of coffee beverage”. His machine used one boiler to push hot water through the coffee and a second to supply steam, making several cups at once rather than one at a time. He showed it at the General Expo of Turin that year and won a bronze medal. He never put it into industrial production, building only a few by hand for his own businesses, so the credit for the first commercial espresso machines went to Milan.

How it was made: Moriondo was born in Turin on 6 June 1851 into a family of entrepreneurs and kept improving and patenting his design in the following years.

Where it is now: He died at Marentino near Turin on 31 May 1914. No original machine survives; in 2018 a replica was built from the patent's instructions and is now in the MUMAC coffee machine museum at Binasco, near Milan.

• The Turin newspaper Gazzetta Piemontese ran an article on Moriondo's invention in July 1884.
• He registered an international application for the patent in Paris on 23 October 1885.
• Google marked his 171st birthday with a Doodle on 6 June 2022.

Sources: Gazzetta Piemontese article on Moriondo, July 1884 (Wikimedia Commons); Il Post: L'uomo che inventò la macchina per il caffè espresso (2022); Google Doodles: Angelo Moriondo's 171st birthday (2022); Wikipedia: Angelo Moriondo

Hills Bros. and the vacuum-packed coffee can (1900) (1900)

Brothers Austin and Reuben Hills bought the Arabian Coffee & Spice Company in San Francisco in 1878. In 1898 Edward Norton of New York patented a way of canning food under vacuum, and in 1900 Hills Bros. became the first firm to pack coffee that way. Coffee men of the day reported that vacuum-packed coffee kept fresh longer than coffee packed any other way. Other roasters followed, and for decades the vacuum can was how most Americans bought their coffee.

How it was made: The Hills brothers were sons of a Maine-born shipbuilder; they built their coffee business in San Francisco and packed under Norton's patents.

Where it is now: The family sold the company in 1976. Nestlé bought Hills Bros. in 1985, Sara Lee in 1999 and Massimo Zanetti Beverage USA in 2006, which still sells the brand.

• From 1898 the cans carried a “taster”, a turbaned Arab man in a robe drinking from a cup; in 1990 the company replaced him with a figure meant to evoke its American founders.
• A rival San Francisco firm, M.J. Brandenstein & Co., maker of MJB, did not start packing coffee in vacuum cans until 1914; the two brands later shared an owner, Nestlé.
• Ukers wrote in 1922 that vacuum sealing machines could close cans at forty to fifty a minute.

Try it yourself: Hills Bros. ground coffee, still sold in the can (Hills Bros coffee on Amazon)

Sources: W. H. Ukers, All About Coffee (1922), on Norton's 1898 patent and Hills Brothers' 1900 vacuum pack (Project Gutenberg); Saudi Aramco World: America's Arabian 'Cuppa Joe' (2010); Wikipedia: Hills Bros. Coffee

Satori Kato's soluble coffee (1901) (1901-1903)

Satori Kato, a Japanese chemist who had made a soluble tea in Japan, came to Chicago around 1899 and produced a soluble coffee that went on sale in 1901, the year he showed it at the Pan-American Exposition. His US patent, filed in April 1901 and granted on 11 August 1903, was assigned to the Kato Coffee Company. The process pressed the fats out of roasted, ground coffee, distilled off its volatile oil, boiled the extract down to a hard solid and granulated it, then mixed some of the granules back with the oil and dried them at low temperature to keep the aroma. Kato was long credited as the inventor of instant coffee, until research showed David Strang of Invercargill, New Zealand, had patented one in 1889-90.

How it was made: Kato brought a soluble tea to Chicago around 1899; it did not sell, but it put him in touch with coffee men, for whom he made a soluble coffee.

Where it is now: Little is known of Kato's later life. The first instant coffee with wide commercial success was George Washington's Red E Coffee of 1909, and during the First World War the US military bought its entire output, which peaked at 37,000 pounds a day.

• Kato's patent says the dried mix should be kept above freezing but preferably below 40°F to protect the aroma.
• Strang's method blew hot air over brewed coffee to dry it; an expert quoted by Works in Progress thinks the result probably tasted “horrible”.
• Washington's Red E Coffee was also described as “disagreeable”; it succeeded because he built the first industrial-scale plant, in Brooklyn.

Sources: US Patent 735,777, Coffee Concentrate and Process of Making Same (Kato, filed 11 April 1901, granted 11 August 1903) (Google Patents PDF); W. H. Ukers, All About Coffee (1922), coffee chronology (Project Gutenberg); Works in Progress: A brief history of instant coffee (2026); Wikipedia: Satori Kato

Bezzera and Pavoni: espresso by the cup (1901-1905) (1901-1905)

Luigi Bezzera of Milan applied for an Italian patent on an improved coffee machine on 19 December 1901. His US patent, filed in June 1902 and granted on 28 April 1903, was already assigned to Desiderio Pavoni of Milan. The machine had a steam boiler and a bell-shaped chamber holding one serving of ground coffee, with a perforated plate to spread the water, so that each cup was “prepared separately, so that fresh coffee is always served”. In 1905 Pavoni founded La Pavoni in a small workshop on Via Parini in Milan and built the Ideale, the first of a line of bar machines.

How it was made: Bezzera improved on Moriondo's idea of a steam-powered coffee machine, aiming for faster service and fresher cups.

Where it is now: The two men went on to run separate companies; Bezzera's is now run by his great-grandson Luca Bezzera, and La Pavoni is still based near Milan. In 1961 La Pavoni launched the Europiccola, its first electric home espresso machine.

• Bezzera's patent added a small exhaust tube to let off leftover steam after each cup, so the next serving would not spurt.
• The boiler's delivery valve sat low on the boiler so hot water could still reach it when the boiler was nearly empty.
• The US patent describes Bezzera as a “maker of liquors” living at 13 Via Orso in Milan; some believe he was also the Milan mechanic Moriondo hired to build his machine, though this is not proven.

Try it yourself: La Pavoni's lever home machine, from the firm that bought Bezzera's patent (La Pavoni Europiccola lever espresso machine on Amazon)

Sources: US Patent 726,793, Coffee-making machine (Bezzera, assigned to Pavoni, 1903) (Google Patents PDF); La Pavoni: History of heritage; Wikipedia: Luigi Bezzera

Kaffee HAG: decaf from Bremen (1906) (1906)

Ludwig Roselius, a Bremen coffee merchant, set up Kaffee HAG (Kaffee-Handels-Aktien-Gesellschaft) in 1906 to sell the first commercial decaffeinated coffee. The patent he filed that May with Johann Friedrich Meyer and Karl Wimmer treated whole green beans in a vacuum with an extracting liquid, removed the caffeine from the extract, then put the rest of the extract back into the beans and dried them gently. The US patent was granted in 1908. In the United States the product was sold from 1910 by Merck as Dekafa and from 1914 as Kaffee Hag; in France it became Sanka, from “sans caféine”.

How it was made: Roselius, born in Bremen in 1874, used early medical reports to sell the idea of coffee without caffeine and hired designers to build a strong brand.

Where it is now: Roselius died in Berlin on 15 May 1943. The American business was seized as enemy property in 1917; the HAG and Sanka names later passed to General Foods and Kraft, and HAG has belonged to JDE Peet's since 2015.

• The HAG trademark was a red lifebuoy, meant to suggest protection from caffeine; a red heart was added in 1925.
• By 1944 Kaffee HAG was on the menu of the US House of Representatives restaurant at three times the price of regular coffee.
• Roselius met Hitler privately in 1922 and applied twice to join the Nazi Party, but was rejected, reportedly because he promoted “degenerate art” on Bremen's Böttcherstraße.

Try it yourself: Decaf whole beans, the descendant of Roselius's 1906 idea (decaf whole bean coffee on Amazon)

Sources: US Patent 897,763, Treatment of coffee (Meyer, Roselius and Wimmer, filed 4 May 1906, granted 1 September 1908) (Google Patents PDF); W. H. Ukers, All About Coffee (1922), coffee chronology (Project Gutenberg); The Wolfsonian-FIU: Unveiling the Secrets of Decaf (2021); Wikipedia: Ludwig Roselius; Wikipedia: Café HAG

Melitta Bentz's paper coffee filter (1908) (1908)

Melitta Bentz was tired of bitter coffee full of grounds. She experimented with a perforated brass cup and a sheet of blotting paper taken from her son's exercise book. On 20 June 1908 she registered her filter with the German patent office, which granted protection on 8 July for a “coffee filter with a domed underside, recessed bottom and inclined flow holes”. Her company was entered in the commercial register on 15 December 1908, and at the Leipzig Trade Fair in 1909 it sold more than 1,200 filters. The paper filter made clean, sediment-free drip coffee easy at home.

How it was made: Bentz, born in Dresden on 31 January 1873 and a mother of three, started the business in her home city.

Where it is now: She died on 29 June 1950. The company moved from Dresden to Minden in 1929 and, as the Melitta Group, still makes filters and coffee there.

• The business was registered with a starting capital of just 72 Reichspfennig.
• Bentz gave her staff a five-day week, three weeks of holiday and a Christmas bonus.
• Her tools, by the company's own account, were a brass cup, a blotting sheet, a hammer and a nail.

Try it yourself: Melitta's pour-over cone and paper filters, the direct heirs of the 1908 filter (Melitta pour-over cone coffee filter holder on Amazon)

Sources: German Patent and Trade Mark Office (DPMA): The invention of the coffee filter (on the 1908 registration); Melitta Group: 150 years of Melitta Bentz; Wikipedia: Melitta Bentz

The French press (1929-1958) (1929-1958)

Coffee makers with a plunger go back at least to 1852, when two Parisians, Mayer and Delforge, patented one whose filter did not seal against the pot. The modern design comes from Milan: a patent filed in Italy in 1928 and in the United States on 2 April 1929 describes a vessel with a sliding filter on a rod, held in place by a spring so it stays wherever you push it. In 1958 Faliero Bondanini patented an improved version, which was made by the French clarinet maker Martin SA under the Melior brand. The Danish firm Bodum sold its first press, the Bistro, in 1974, bought the rights to the Chambord in 1983 and took over Martin SA in 1991.

How it was made: The US patent was filed in the name of Ugo Paolini of Milan, who assigned half to Attilio Calimani and half to Giulio Moneta, the designers usually credited.

Where it is now: The Chambord is still made and sold by Bodum. The device has many names: cafetière in Britain, plunger in Australia and New Zealand, cafetière à piston in France.

• The US patent, No. 1,797,672, was not granted until 24 March 1931, two years after it was filed.
• The 1929 patent says the spent grounds stay “trapped between the bottom of the vessel and the filter”, so the coffee can be poured without lifting the lid.
• Bodum tried to register “French Press” as a trademark; it failed in the United States, and Canada struck it off in 2012.

Try it yourself: Bodum's Chambord, the descendant of the 1958 Melior design (Bodum Chambord French press on Amazon)

Sources: US Patent 1,797,672, Apparatus for preparing infusions, particularly for preparing coffee (Paolini, assigned to Calimani and Moneta, 1931) (USPTO PDF); Blick: Bien sûr que la french press est la meilleure méthode pour un bon café (2023); Wikipedia: Bodum; Wikipedia: French press

The Moka Express (1933) (1933)

Alfonso Bialetti opened a workshop in Crusinallo, near Omegna in Piedmont, in 1919. In 1933 he created the Moka Express, a stovetop pot in which water heated in the bottom chamber is pushed up through a basket of ground coffee into the top. He named it after Mokha in Yemen, the old coffee port. Few were sold at first; sales took off after his son Renato took over the business in the 1940s and advertised it heavily. Its faceted Art Deco shape is in the permanent collections of the Triennale di Milano and MoMA.

How it was made: The pot grew out of Bialetti's aluminium workshop, which made semi-finished metal goods before it made coffee makers.

Where it is now: Bialetti still makes the Moka Express; an induction-hob version was added in 2014. A mustachioed little man, “l'omino con i baffi”, has been the brand's mascot since the 1950s; accounts differ on whether the illustrator Paul Campani or Renato Bialetti drew him.

• Under Alfonso the pot sold slowly, at fairs and markets: about 10,000 a year between 1936 and 1940, according to Il Sole 24 Ore. Renato's 1950s factory could make 18,000 a day.
• Later improvements, including a cappuccino-making version, were patented in the 1980s by Luigi De Ponti and assigned to Bialetti.
• In 1993 Francesco Ranzoni bought Alfonso Bialetti & Co. from Faema, and the company later merged with the cookware maker Rondine.

Try it yourself: The original Bialetti Moka Express, still made today (Bialetti Moka Express 6 cup on Amazon)

Sources: Bialetti: La storia (company history); Bialetti: Moka Express (on MoMA and Triennale collections); Il Sole 24 Ore: Storia della Bialetti, dal boom della moka ai bilanci in rosso (2018); Wikipedia: Moka pot

Nescafé (1938) (1938)

After the 1929 crash, coffee prices collapsed and unsold beans piled up in Brazil; Nestlé was asked whether it could turn the surplus into a soluble coffee. Its chemist Max Morgenthaler found that the aroma survived only if the soluble coffee contained enough carbohydrates. Nestlé ended the project in 1935, but he kept going at home and had his breakthrough in April 1937: coffee extract spray-dried with roughly equal parts of carbohydrates such as maltodextrin or glucose. Nescafé went on sale in Switzerland on 1 April 1938, made at the Orbe factory in the canton of Vaud.

How it was made: The project began in response to Brazil's surplus; at one point the Brazilian government destroyed 10.3 billion pounds of coffee over several years to prop up prices.

Where it is now: Nescafé reached Britain two months after its Swiss launch and the United States in 1939, and became a soldiers' staple in the Second World War. Freeze-dried Nescafé Gold followed in 1965, and by 2013 Nestlé said more than 5,500 cups of Nescafé were drunk every second.

• When Morgenthaler let Nestlé's board taste his coffee in 1937, one executive is said to have exclaimed, “Mother Nestlé has produced a beautiful baby!”
• In 1942 the US government classed Nescafé as a commodity vital to the war effort, and most of the American output went to the troops.
• The first idea was “coffee cubes” that would keep their flavour and dissolve easily; the finished product was a powder instead.

Try it yourself: Nescafé Gold, the freeze-dried successor to the 1938 powder (Nescafé Gold instant coffee on Amazon)

Sources: Nestlé UK: Nescafé marks its 75th anniversary (2013); Works in Progress: A brief history of instant coffee (2026); Swiss National Museum blog: Instant coffee without the pot (2018); swissinfo.ch: Nescafé continues to roast coffee rivals (2004)

Gaggia's lever machine and the birth of crema (1938-1948) (1938-1948)

Achille Gaggia ran his family's coffee bar, Caffè Achille, in Milan. On 5 September 1938 he filed Italian patent no. 365726 for “Lampo”, a mechanism that used hot water under pressure instead of steam. A later patent covered a lever and piston, and his first machine was the Tipo Classica. The high pressure produced a creamy layer on the cup that Gaggia called “crema naturale”. Gaggia founded his company in 1947 and incorporated it in 1948, later moving to Robecco sul Naviglio near Milan.

How it was made: The idea came from Gaggia's own experiments with extraction at the family bar.

Where it is now: Gaggia later made Gilda, its first home machine, and the Baby Gaggia, designed with Makio Hasuike. The stainless-steel Gaggia Classic of 1991 was still a bestseller more than 30 years later. The brand passed to Saeco in 1999, to Philips in 2009 and to Evoca Group in 2017.

• Gaggia showed Lampo at the Milan Samples Fair in 1939, but bar owners could not easily fit it to their machines, so the company began building complete machines with the system inside.
• Gaggia entered the bean-to-cup market in 1999 with its first superautomatic machine, the Syncrony Digital.
• Gaggia's 1938 mechanism was called “Lampo”, Italian for lightning.

Try it yourself: The Gaggia Classic, the brand's long-running home espresso machine (Gaggia Classic Pro espresso machine on Amazon)

Sources: Gaggia: Our history (company archive account of patent no. 365726); Gaggia: 85 years of heritage, 1991-1999; Wikipedia: Gaggia

The Chemex (1941) (1941)

Peter Schlumbohm, born in Kiel in 1896, earned a doctorate in chemistry in Berlin and settled in New York in 1936. He filed his US patent on 13 April 1939, and on 6 May 1941 it was granted as a “filtering device”: a funnel holding a paper filter, made in one piece with a flask, with a deep groove that lets displaced air escape and doubles as a pouring spout. The patent says it was meant for coffee and tea but could also be used in the laboratory. A wooden collar tied with a leather thong lets you hold the hot glass.

How it was made: Schlumbohm and two partners incorporated the Chemex Corporation in New York in 1939, the year he filed the patent.

Where it is now: Schlumbohm died in 1962. The Chemex is still made, by the Chemex Corporation in Chicopee, Massachusetts.

• In 1942 the Chemex appeared on the cover of the Museum of Modern Art's bulletin “Useful Objects in Wartime”.
• The patent says the flask is “the well known shape of an Erlenmeyer flask”, the conical bottle of chemistry labs, and pitches the paper filter as a convenience to the housewife who used to empty grounds into the sink.
• Schlumbohm patented some 300 items, and the Chemex turns up at James Bond's breakfast in Ian Fleming's novel From Russia, with Love.

Try it yourself: The classic six-cup Chemex with wood collar, close to the 1941 design (Chemex 6 cup pour over on Amazon)

Sources: US Patent 2,241,368, Filtering device (Schlumbohm, 1941) (USPTO PDF); Lemelson-MIT Program: Peter Schlumbohm; Wikipedia: Chemex Coffeemaker

The International Coffee Agreement (1962) (1962-1989)

The International Coffee Agreement was signed in New York on 28 September 1962. Its preamble recognised “the exceptional importance of coffee” to countries that depended on it for export earnings. It came into force provisionally on 1 July 1963, once 26 exporting countries with 89.5 percent of 1961 exports and 12 importing countries with 81.5 percent of imports had signed on, and the International Coffee Organization was set up under United Nations auspices. The agreement used export quotas, cut when prices fell below a target and raised when they rose above it. On 4 July 1989 members failed to agree new quotas and the system was suspended; the ICO's average indicator price fell from $1.34 a pound in the five years before to $0.77 in the five years after.

• The agreement has been renewed many times, in 1968, 1976, 1983, 1994, 2001, 2007 and 2022.
• The ICO's members today account for about 91% of world coffee production and 64% of consumption.
• The 2022 agreement was opened for signature in Bogotá, Colombia, on 6 October 2022.

Sources: International Coffee Agreement, 1962, UN Treaty Series vol. 469, No. 6791; International Coffee Organization: About us; Wikipedia: International Coffee Agreement

Peet's Coffee, Berkeley (1966) (1966)

Alfred Peet grew up in Alkmaar in the Netherlands, where his father ran a small coffee roastery, and trained with Twinings in London before working as a tea taster in the Dutch East Indies. He moved to San Francisco in 1955 and was dismayed by American coffee. On 1 April 1966 he opened a shop at Vine and Walnut streets in Berkeley that roasted top-quality arabica beans dark and sold them fresh. Peet's introduced dark roasts such as French roast to many Americans and is usually counted as the start of coffee's “second wave”.

How it began: Business was slow at first; Peet gave away a free cup with every pound and spent hours teaching customers about blends.

What became of it: Peet sold the company in 1979 and died in Ashland, Oregon, on 29 August 2007. Peet's was bought by JAB in 2012 and is now part of JDE Peet's; the original Vine Street shop still trades.

• Major Dickason's Blend is named after a regular, Key Dickason, who helped create it. When Peet named it for him he objected, “But I was a sergeant,” and Peet replied, “You've been promoted.”
• Peet's first employee, Bill Coffin, was 15 when he started; he remembers a customer saying she could do better with her percolator at home.
• In 1984 Starbucks co-founder Jerry Baldwin bought Peet's four shops, and in 1987 he and his partners sold Starbucks to keep Peet's.

Try it yourself: Peet's best-selling dark roast, named after a Berkeley regular (Peet's Major Dickason's Blend whole bean on Amazon)

Sources: Berkeleyside: A coffee revolution: Peet's' first ever employee spills the beans (interview with Bill Coffin, 2023); Berkeleyside: Peet's: Founded in Berkeley, acquired in Germany (2012); Language Log (Univ. of Pennsylvania): Sergeant Dickason's Blend (2023); Wikipedia: Alfred Peet

Starbucks (1971) (1971-1987)

Jerry Baldwin, Gordon Bowker and Zev Siegl opened the first Starbucks on 30 March 1971 at 2000 Western Avenue, near Seattle's Pike Place Market. It sold coffee beans, tea and spices, not drinks, and at first its beans came from Alfred Peet in Berkeley, who also helped train them; within a few years they were roasting their own. Howard Schultz joined in 1982, and a trip to Italy in 1983 convinced him that espresso bars could work in America. The first Starbucks caffè latte was served in a downtown Seattle test in 1984, and in 1987 Schultz's company bought Starbucks and took its name.

How it was made: Bowker took the name from Starbuck, the first mate in Moby-Dick, after noticing a mining town called “Starbo” on an old map.

Where it is now: Under Schultz, Starbucks went public in 1992 and had about 25,000 stores in 75 countries by late 2016.

• A Brazilian frost in 1975 sent coffee prices soaring; sales fell and the original shop had to move half a block, to 1912 Pike Place.
• Schultz left in 1985 to start his own coffee bar chain, Il Giornale, which used Starbucks beans; Starbucks was its first investor.
• Alfred Peet later distanced himself from Starbucks' very dark roasts: “Baldwin never learned anything from me,” he was quoted as saying.

Try it yourself: Starbucks' house blend, named after the street of its first shop (Starbucks Pike Place Roast whole bean on Amazon)

Sources: Starbucks Coffee Company: Starbucks Company Timeline (2011); HistoryLink.org: Starbucks: The Early Years (Sheila Farr, 2017); Slate: The Starbucks Guide to World Domination (2013); Wikipedia: Starbucks

Mr. Coffee, the automatic drip maker (1972) (1971-1972)

In the early 1970s Vincent Marotta and his school friend Samuel Glazer set out to learn why coffee made at home tasted worse than restaurant coffee. They hired two former Westinghouse engineers, Edmund Abel and Erwin Schulze, to design an automatic drip brewer for the home. Abel's patent, filed on 26 July 1971 and granted on 26 September 1972, describes water flowing from a tray through an electrically heated block into a brewing funnel. Mr. Coffee went on sale in 1972 and passed a million units by April 1974.

How it was made: The machine debuted at the National Housewares show in Chicago in 1971; Marotta and Glazer's company, North American Systems, made and marketed it.

Where it is now: After several changes of owner the brand passed to Sunbeam, then Jarden, and then Newell Brands, which still sells Mr. Coffee machines. Marotta died in 2015.

• Edmund Abel, who designed the heating element, reportedly never drank coffee; he preferred tea.
• From 1973 the spokesman was Joe DiMaggio, who had won a Mr. Coffee at a golf tournament; because of stomach trouble he drank only instant decaf.
• Abel's patent says putting the water tray over the heating block saved power and allowed “a simple molded plastic housing”.

Try it yourself: A Mr. Coffee 12-cup drip brewer, the descendant of the 1972 machine (Mr. Coffee 12 cup coffee maker on Amazon)

Sources: US Patent 3,693,535, Pour-in, instant brewing electric coffee maker (Abel, 1972) (USPTO PDF); ABC News: How Mr. Coffee Inventor Convinced Joe DiMaggio to Be Pitchman (2015); Daily Coffee News: Automatic Drip Brewer Inventor Edmund Abel Dies at Age 92 (2014); The Philadelphia Inquirer (AP): Vincent Marotta, Mr. Coffee cofounder, 91 (2015); Wikipedia: Mr. Coffee

“Specialty coffee” gets its name (1974) (1974)

Erna Knutsen first used the term “specialty coffee” in the Tea & Coffee Trade Journal in 1974, for beans of the best flavour grown in special microclimates. The idea grew into a movement and a trade body: the Specialty Coffee Association of America and its European counterpart, which joined in 2017 as the Specialty Coffee Association. For years the working rule has been that a coffee scoring 80 or more out of 100 on the SCA cupping form counts as specialty. The SCA now defines it more broadly, by distinctive attributes inside the cup (flavour, aroma, mouthfeel) and outside it (origin, producer, growing and processing), recorded with a tool called the Coffee Value Assessment.

• The 80-point threshold on a 100-point cupping form became the widely accepted line between specialty and ordinary coffee.
• In 2025 the SCA took over the Q Grader licence, the best-known coffee-tasting qualification, from the Coffee Quality Institute.
• Knutsen, born in Norway in 1921, started as a secretary at a San Francisco coffee importer, was kept away from the cupping table, and ended up buying the company.

Try it yourself: A classic single-origin specialty coffee from Ethiopia (Ethiopian Yirgacheffe whole bean coffee on Amazon)

Sources: Specialty Coffee Association: What is specialty coffee (official definition); Specialty Coffee Association: About; Ms. Magazine: Meet the Woman Pioneer Who Created Craft Coffee (2020); Wikipedia: Specialty coffee

Nespresso and the coffee pod (1986) (1976-1986)

Eric Favre, a Nestlé employee, devised the Nespresso system, which Nestlé patented in 1976. The idea was to let anyone make an espresso like a skilled barista by sealing measured, ground coffee in a capsule. Nespresso launched in 1986 in Japan, Italy and Switzerland; the first machines looked like commercial office units before the brand was repositioned as a luxury product, with George Clooney in its adverts from 2006. Its patents began to expire in 2012, opening the way for compatible capsules. In the United States the rival idea was Keurig's plastic K-Cup.

How it was made: Favre's capsule system sat inside Nestlé for a decade before the 1986 launch.

Where it is now: Nespresso remains a Nestlé brand. Its aluminium capsules can be recycled, but only about a quarter of them are; each one thrown away leaves about a gram of aluminium waste.

• Favre got the idea from watching the staff of a Rome coffee bar pump the machine's piston several times for each cup.
• Before its Vertuo line, Nespresso held about 3% of the US single-serve market, against 72% for Keurig.
• Only 24.6% of Nespresso capsules are recycled worldwide, although the company says it can recycle all of them.

Try it yourself: Nespresso's smallest capsule machine (Nespresso Essenza Mini on Amazon)

Sources: Nestlé: Company history timeline (Nespresso 1986); EcoWatch: K-Cup Inventor Admits He Doesn't Have a Keurig, Regrets Inventing Them (2015); Wikipedia: Nespresso

The first Fairtrade label (1988) (1988)

On 15 November 1988 the Dutch foundation Stichting Max Havelaar launched the world's first Fairtrade certification mark, driven by Nico Roozen, Frans van der Hoff and the development agency Solidaridad. The first coffee came from the UCIRI cooperative in Mexico, was imported by Van Weely, roasted by Neuteboom and sold first in world shops, then in ordinary Dutch supermarkets. The label took its name from Multatuli's 1860 novel Max Havelaar, whose subtitle is “the coffee auctions of the Netherlands Trading Company” and which criticised colonial rule in the Dutch East Indies. Fairtrade buyers pay a minimum price meant as a safety net when the market falls, plus a premium the farmers invest as they choose.

• Fairtrade now counts more than 775,000 coffee farmers in 592 producer organisations, who have earned over $400 million in premiums since 2020.
• In 2007 the coffee company Douwe Egberts sued the Dutch province of Groningen for requiring Max Havelaar standards in its coffee contract; the province won.
• The Dutch foundation is now called Fairtrade Nederland and is based in Utrecht.

Try it yourself: Coffee carrying the Fairtrade mark that began with Mexican beans in 1988 (Fairtrade certified whole bean coffee on Amazon)

Sources: Multatuli, Max Havelaar, of de koffieveilingen der Nederlandsche Handelsmaatschappy (1860) (Project Gutenberg); Fairtrade: Coffee; Wikipedia: Max Havelaar Foundation

Keurig and the K-Cup (1992-1998) (1992-1998)

John Sylvan and Peter Dragone founded Keurig in Massachusetts in 1992 to brew single cups of coffee from sealed portions. Their patent, filed on 16 September 1992 and granted in July 1994, describes a sealed cartridge holding ground coffee in a filter, pierced by the machine so hot water can pass through. The first brewers went to offices in early 1998, starting in New York and New England, and they were still unreliable. Home brewers followed in 2004, and the K-Cup became the leading single-serve system in the United States.

How it was made: The founders worked unpaid at first and were turned down by many venture capitalists; Green Mountain Coffee Roasters supplied coffee and invested in the company in the 1990s.

Where it is now: Green Mountain bought the rest of Keurig in 2006, and the key K-Cup patent expired in September 2012, opening the door to rival pods. Keurig machines and pods are still sold.

• Sylvan said the name came from the Dutch word for excellence; the Boston Globe reported he found it in a Danish-English dictionary.
• Sylvan was forced out in 1997 and received just over $50,000 for his stake.
• He later said of the pods, “No matter what they say about recycling, those things will never be recyclable,” and admitted, “I feel bad sometimes that I ever did it.”

Try it yourself: A compact Keurig brewer for K-Cup pods (Keurig K-Mini single serve coffee maker on Amazon)

Sources: US Patent 5,325,765, Beverage filter cartridge (Sylvan and Dragone, assigned to Keurig, 1994) (USPTO PDF); Boston Globe Magazine: The Buzz Machine: The inside story of Keurig's rise (2011); EcoWatch: K-Cup Inventor Admits He Doesn't Have a Keurig, Regrets Inventing Them (2015); Wikipedia: Keurig

Panama Geisha (2004) (2004)

Geisha (or Gesha) coffee was collected in the Gesha area of south-western Ethiopia in the 1930s, then sent to Tanzania and, in 1953, to the CATIE research centre in Costa Rica. CATIE handed it out in Panama in the 1960s for its tolerance of leaf rust, but farmers disliked its brittle branches and few planted it. In the mid-2000s Hacienda La Esmeralda in Boquete entered its Geisha in the Best of Panama competition, where its floral, jasmine-like flavours set a green-coffee auction record of about $20 a pound. Prices have climbed ever since.

Where it came from: The plant survived in Panama as a little-used rust-tolerant variety until the Peterson family of Hacienda La Esmeralda found how it tasted when grown high up.

Where it is now: Geisha is now grown in many countries and remains the star of Panama's auctions. In 2019 a natural-process Geisha from the Lamastus family's Elida Estate sold for $1,029 a pound at the 23rd Best of Panama auction, then a record.

• Sources differ on the breakthrough year: one dates Esmeralda's first auction sale, at $21 a pound, to 2004; World Coffee Research dates the Petersons' record entry to 2005.
• In 2022, 3.1 kilograms of Lamastus Geisha sold for $42,000 at a private auction.
• Best of Panama lots are judged by blind cupping under a protocol run by the Specialty Coffee Association of Panama.

Try it yourself: Panama Geisha beans, the variety that set the auction records (Panama Geisha coffee beans on Amazon)

Sources: Best of Panama (Specialty Coffee Association of Panama): About; World Coffee Research: Geisha (Panama) variety; Daily Coffee News: Elida Estate Gesha Earns $1,029 Per Pound (2019); Wikipedia: Geisha (coffee)

The Hario V60 and the pour-over revival (2004-2005) (2004-2005)

Hario was founded in 1921 as a maker of laboratory glass. In the 1980s its designers made a cone-shaped dripper with wire rods to hold the paper, but it lost out to instant coffee and machines. In 2004 they revisited the idea, working with resin makers and potters in Arita, and the V60 went on sale on 1 October 2005. It is named for its 60-degree cone. Spiral ribs stop the paper sticking to the wall, and one large hole at the bottom leaves the flow to the person pouring, so grind and pouring speed decide the cup. It caught on first in American third-wave cafés, which brewed single-origin coffee one cup at a time, and only later in Japan.

How it was made: The V60 came out of Hario's earlier conical dripper and its aim of matching the taste of cloth-filtered coffee with a paper filter.

Where it is now: The V60 is still made and sold worldwide; for its 20th anniversary in 2025 Hario released the V60 NEO.

• Hario says the V60 spread around the world after the 2010 World Brewers Cup in London; by 2025 it had been used to win six World Brewers Cup titles.
• The phrase “third wave” is usually credited to Trish Rothgeb in a 2003 article, though Timothy Castle used it a few years earlier.
• At the launch, Hario's managing director recalls, Japanese cafés preferred immersion brewing, and using scales or timers was uncommon.

Try it yourself: A Hario V60 dripper with filters, the cone that defined third-wave pour-over (Hario V60 pour over kit on Amazon)

Sources: Hario UK: Birth of the Hario V60 (company history, 2018); Standart Magazine: HARIO: The Shape of Coffee, Reconsidered; Wikipedia: Third wave of coffee

The AeroPress (2005) (2005)

Alan Adler, an engineer who taught a course on sensors at Stanford, was best known for the Aerobie flying ring, which set a Guinness record for the farthest thrown object at 1,333 feet. Dismayed by home coffee makers, he began experimenting in his garage in Palo Alto and studied which variables change the taste of brewed coffee. He wanted one good cup, quickly: drip cones took four or five minutes to drain, so he settled on a closed chamber that he could pressurise. He introduced the AeroPress at Coffee Fest in Seattle in November 2005. The plastic tube uses air pressure from a plunger to push water through the coffee, shortening brewing time and, the company says, cutting bitterness.

How it was made: Adler founded his company, Superflight, in 1984 to make the Aerobie, and renamed it Aerobie Inc. in 2005, the year it launched the coffee maker.

Where it is now: Adler sold the Aerobie toy business in 2017 (the brand now belongs to Spin Master) and the company became AeroPress, Inc.; in 2021 Tiny took a controlling stake. The AeroPress is still made and sold worldwide.

• The first World AeroPress Championship was held in Oslo in 2008 with just three competitors; by 2023 it drew over 5,000 competitors across 178 events.
• Adler holds more than 40 patents, for things as varied as aircraft instrumentation, a telescope lens and flutes, and he plays end-blown flutes himself.
• Accounts of the invention differ: the company speaks of two years and over 30 prototypes from 2003, while Adler told Sprudge he made a working version in a day and spent nearly a year refining it.

Try it yourself: The original AeroPress, the same basic design as 2005 (AeroPress Original coffee maker on Amazon)

Sources: AeroPress: The Story of Alan Adler (inventor's story); Sprudge: Our Interview With AeroPress Inventor Alan Adler (2014); Daily Coffee News: Alan Adler Presses On: Inventor Retains Aeropress Company (2017); Perfect Daily Grind: The History of the AeroPress, From Concept to Championships (2019); Wikipedia: AeroPress

Record coffee prices and the climate threat (2025) (2024-2026)

The International Coffee Organization's composite price averaged 354.32 US cents a pound in February 2025, the highest monthly average on record and nearly double a year earlier, surpassing the previous high of 305.13 cents set in March 1977. Brazil, which grows nearly 40 percent of the world's coffee, had seen five years of disappointing arabica harvests because of bad weather. Prices eased in 2026 as Brazil's record crop reached market: the ICO composite fell to 262.18 cents in September 2026. Behind the swings is a longer worry. A 2019 study found that at least 60 percent of the world's 124 wild coffee species are threatened with extinction, and wild arabica is rated Endangered once climate change is factored in.

• The ICO linked part of February 2025's mid-month price drop to the New York exchange raising margin requirements for arabica contracts on 10 February.
• The USDA forecast a record Brazilian harvest of 71.9 million 60-kg bags for 2026/27, ending five weak arabica years.
• Adding climate projections to its assessment moves wild arabica from Least Concern to Endangered, a jump of three categories.

Sources: International Coffee Organization: Coffee Market Report, February 2025; International Coffee Organization: Coffee Market Report, September 2026; USDA Foreign Agricultural Service: Coffee: World Markets and Trade (July 2026); Davis et al., High extinction risk for wild coffee species (Science Advances, 2019)