Timeline of Coffee
Coffee from wild arabica in the forests of Ethiopia and the first coffee drinking in Yemen around 1450 through Ottoman and European coffeehouses, colonial plantations, espresso and instant coffee to the record prices of 2025.
- Category
- Agriculture & Food
- Events
- 30 events ~1 million years ago – 2025
- Generated
- by claude-opus-5-5
~1 million – 350,000 years ago: Arabica coffee arises as a natural hybrid
Coffea arabica, the source of about 60 percent of the world's coffee, formed when two wild species, Coffea canephora and Coffea eugenioides, hybridized; wild arabica grows in the forests of southwestern Ethiopia and on South Sudan's Boma Plateau. Genome studies differ on the date: a 2021 analysis put it at 1.08 million to 543,000 years ago, a 2024 genome assembly at 610,000 to 350,000 years ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coffea_arabica~1450: Sufis in Yemen take up coffee drinking
The earliest reliable accounts describe Sufi mystics in Yemen drinking coffee brewed from roasted beans to stay awake through night devotions; the 16th-century scholar Abd al-Qadir al-Jaziri credited Jamal al-Din al-Dhabhani, a mufti of Aden who died about 1470, as the first to adopt it. Most accounts trace the plant to Ethiopia. The tale of a goatherd, later named Kaldi, who discovered coffee is a legend first printed in 1671.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_coffee#Yemen1511: Mecca's market inspector bans coffee
Khair Beg, the Mamluk official in charge of Mecca's markets, had a council of jurists declare coffee unlawful, and coffee was burned in the streets. The Mamluk sultan in Cairo, Qansuh al-Ghawri, did not uphold a general ban and drinking resumed, but the religious legality of coffee was argued over for decades, and later bans in Cairo and Istanbul also failed to suppress it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_coffee#Spread_of_coffee~1555: First coffeehouses open in Istanbul
According to the Ottoman chronicler İbrahim Peçevi, two merchants, Hakam from Aleppo and Shams from Damascus, opened the first coffeehouses in Istanbul's Tahtakale district in the Islamic year 962, which ran from late 1554 to late 1555. Coffeehouses spread through Ottoman cities and became centers of urban social life, surviving repeated attempts by religious and political authorities to close them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coffeehouse#Ottoman_Empire1652: Pasqua Rosée opens London's first coffeehouse
Pasqua Rosée, a servant of Greek origin brought from Smyrna by merchant Daniel Edwards, began selling coffee in St Michael's Alley, Cornhill. His business became London's first documented coffeehouse, and a surviving handbill advertised the drink's supposed benefits. Coffeehouses soon became meeting places for merchants, writers and political discussion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pasqua_Ros%C3%A9e1685: Johannes Diodato opens Vienna's first coffeehouse
On January 17, Johannes Diodato, an Armenian merchant born in Istanbul, received a 20-year court privilege to prepare and sell coffee, tea and sherbet in Vienna, and he opened the city's first documented coffeehouse. The popular story that Georg Franz Kolschitzky founded Vienna's first café with beans abandoned by the Ottoman army after the 1683 siege goes back to a 1783 account and is regarded as a legend.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viennese_coffee_house_culture~1686: Edward Lloyd opens his London coffeehouse
Edward Lloyd opened a coffeehouse on Great Tower Street near the Port of London sometime between 1685 and 1687; its first known mention is a London Gazette advertisement of February 1688. Shipowners, merchants and underwriters met there for shipping news, and the marine insurance market that grew up there became Lloyd's of London.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lloyd%27s_Coffee_House1699: Dutch East India Company plants coffee on Java
After a first shipment of seedlings from the Dutch post on India's Malabar Coast was lost to flooding at Batavia in 1696, a second shipment took root on Java. The Dutch East India Company sent its first Java coffee to Europe in 1711, and within a few decades colonial plantations ended the dominance of Yemen, whose port of Mocha had been the main source of the world's coffee.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coffee_production_in_Indonesia1720s: Gabriel de Clieu carries coffee to Martinique
Gabriel de Clieu, a French naval officer, took a coffee seedling from the royal garden in Paris to Martinique, by his own account published in 1774 sharing his water ration with it during the voyage; sources date the trip to 1720 or 1723. Coffee was already being grown in Dutch Suriname and possibly Saint-Domingue, but Martinique's plantations became a source for cultivation elsewhere in the Caribbean.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabriel_de_Clieu1727: Francisco de Melo Palheta brings coffee to Brazil
Sent to French Guiana to help settle a border dispute, the colonial officer Francisco de Melo Palheta returned to Pará in northern Brazil with coffee seeds and planted the colony's first coffee. The popular tale that the French governor's wife smuggled them to him in a bouquet is a legend. Coffee stayed a minor crop until it spread to the Rio de Janeiro region from the 1770s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coffee_production_in_Brazil1791: Slave revolt engulfs Saint-Domingue's coffee plantations
By the late 1780s the French colony of Saint-Domingue, where enslaved Africans worked the plantations, produced between half and 60 percent of the world's coffee by different estimates. The uprising of enslaved people that began in August and became the Haitian Revolution destroyed hundreds of coffee plantations, and coffee production in independent Haiti never regained its colonial scale.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coffee_production_in_Haiti1819: Friedlieb Ferdinand Runge isolates caffeine
Friedlieb Ferdinand Runge, a young German chemist, isolated caffeine from coffee beans that Johann Wolfgang von Goethe had given him after a demonstration of the pupil-dilating effect of belladonna, and described it in print in 1820. French chemists, including Pierre Jean Robiquet, isolated it independently in 1821, and Hermann Emil Fischer first synthesized it in 1895.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedlieb_Ferdinand_Runge1840s: Brazil becomes the largest coffee producer
Plantations in southeastern Brazil, worked by enslaved people, raised the country's share of world production to about 40 percent in the 1840s, making it the largest producer, a position it has held since. After the slave trade ended in 1850 and slavery was abolished in 1888, immigrants from Italy, Spain and Japan supplied much of the labor, and coffee wealth helped make São Paulo an industrial center.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coffee_production_in_Brazil1869: Coffee leaf rust devastates Ceylon
A fungus of East African origin, first reported on the coffee estates of Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, in the late 1860s, was described and named Hemileia vastatrix by the mycologists Miles Joseph Berkeley and Christopher Edmund Broome. Ceylon had been one of the largest coffee exporters, but by 1890 about 90 percent of its coffee land had been abandoned, much of it for tea; the rust later reached every major growing region.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemileia_vastatrix1884: Angelo Moriondo patents a steam coffee machine
Angelo Moriondo, a hotel and bar owner in Turin, received a patent on May 16 for "new steam machinery for the economic and instantaneous confection of coffee beverage" and showed the machine at the Turin General Exposition. Usually credited as the earliest known espresso machine, it brewed coffee in bulk rather than by the cup, and Moriondo built only a few for his own businesses.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angelo_Moriondo1900: Robusta coffee introduced to Java
After coffee leaf rust devastated arabica plantations, Dutch planters introduced Coffea canephora to Java. Native to western and central Africa and sold as robusta, the species tolerated conditions unsuitable for arabica and became important in instant coffee and blends. Its cultivation later expanded especially in Vietnam, Brazil, Indonesia and Uganda.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coffea_canephora1901: Luigi Bezzera patents a single-serving espresso machine
Luigi Bezzera of Milan applied on December 19 for a patent on a steam machine that forced water through ground coffee held in a portafilter, brewing individual cups to order. Desiderio Pavoni bought the patent in 1903 and sold machines through his La Pavoni company, and the two men showed "caffè espresso" at the 1906 Milan fair. At about 1.5 bar, these machines made a thinner, more bitter drink than modern espresso.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luigi_Bezzera1906: Brazil's coffee states sign the Taubaté Agreement
Facing a record crop and falling prices, the heads of the states of São Paulo, Minas Gerais and Rio de Janeiro agreed at Taubaté in February to buy surplus coffee and keep it off the market. The policy, called valorization, raised prices for a time but encouraged more planting, and the resulting oversupply deepened Brazil's coffee crash in the Great Depression.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taubat%C3%A9_Agreement1906: Ludwig Roselius patents a decaffeination process
Ludwig Roselius, a Bremen coffee merchant, and co-workers including the chemist Karl Wimmer developed the first commercially successful decaffeination process, which steamed green beans and extracted the caffeine with benzene, a carcinogen later replaced by other solvents, water or supercritical carbon dioxide. Roselius patented it and founded Kaffee HAG (Kaffee-Handels-Aktiengesellschaft, or Coffee Trading Company) to sell the coffee.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decaffeination1908: Melitta Bentz registers a paper coffee filter
Melitta Bentz devised a coffee filter using blotting paper in a perforated pot to keep grounds out of the drink. On June 20 the Imperial Patent Office registered it as a utility model, a form of intellectual-property protection. She founded a business in Dresden that December; the familiar cone-shaped filter followed in the 1930s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melitta_Bentz1933: Alfonso Bialetti launches the Moka Express
Alfonso Bialetti began selling the Moka Express, an aluminum stovetop pot developed with Luigi De Ponti, in which pressure from water heated in the lower chamber pushes it up through ground coffee. Few were sold until his son Renato promoted it heavily after taking over the firm in the 1940s. Moka pots work at 1 to 2 bar, so their strong coffee is not espresso, which is brewed at about 9 bar.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moka_pot1938: Nestlé launches Nescafé
Nestlé introduced Nescafé, a spray-dried soluble coffee developed by a team under the Swiss chemist Max Morgenthaler, in Switzerland on April 1; the company says the work began when the Brazilian government asked it to find an outlet for surplus beans. David Strang had patented a soluble coffee powder in New Zealand in 1890, but Nescafé was more stable, and United States Army rations in World War II made it known worldwide.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nescaf%C3%A91948: Gaggia's lever machines bring crema to espresso
Achille Gaggia, a Milan bar owner who had filed a patent for a steamless coffee machine in 1938, began producing espresso machines with a spring-loaded lever piston, patented in 1947, that forced water through the coffee at several times the pressure of steam machines without scorching it. The result was crema, the foam now seen as the mark of espresso; in 1961 the Faema E61 replaced the lever with an electric pump.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaggia1962: International Coffee Agreement sets export quotas
Coffee-producing and coffee-consuming countries signed the first International Coffee Agreement at the UN in New York, assigning export quotas to producers to keep prices high and stable. The International Coffee Organization, set up in London in 1963, administered the system, which with suspensions remained in force under successive agreements until 1989.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Coffee_Agreement1986: Nestlé launches the Nespresso capsule system
Nestlé launched the Nespresso system in Switzerland, Italy and Japan, brewing individual servings from sealed capsules. Developed from work by engineer Eric Favre, the system initially targeted offices before expanding into homes. The company introduced its direct-order Nespresso Club in 1989, helping build a premium consumer brand.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nespresso1987: Howard Schultz buys Starbucks
Starbucks was founded in Seattle in 1971 by Jerry Baldwin, Zev Siegl and Gordon Bowker, who were inspired and at first supplied by the Berkeley roaster Alfred Peet; it began as a seller of beans and equipment. Howard Schultz, its former marketing director, bought it and merged it with his Il Giornale espresso bars, modeled on those of Milan; by 2022 Starbucks had more than 35,000 stores in about 80 countries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starbucks1988: Max Havelaar launches the first Fairtrade label
The Dutch foundation Stichting Max Havelaar, set up with the development agency Solidaridad by Nico Roozen and Frans van der Hoff, launched a certification label on November 15 for coffee bought from small farmers on fairer terms, starting with beans from a farmers' cooperative in Mexico. It was named after the title character of Multatuli's 1860 novel about colonial abuses in Java's coffee trade.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stichting_Max_Havelaar1989: Coffee export quotas collapse
The council of the International Coffee Organization suspended export quotas on July 4 after members failed to agree on new shares, with Brazil resisting cuts and consuming countries led by the United States pressing for more of the mild arabicas in demand. Without quotas, prices fell: the organization's indicator price averaged about 40 percent less over the next five years than over the previous five.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Coffee_Agreement#Breakdown_of_the_1989_agreement1999: Vietnam becomes the second-largest coffee producer
Coffee, introduced by the French in the 19th century, spread rapidly across Vietnam's Central Highlands after the Đổi Mới market reforms of 1986, and Vietnam, which grows almost entirely robusta, overtook Colombia to rank second only to Brazil in output. Its rapid growth coincided with a world price slump that reached its low in 2001, a period known as the coffee crisis.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coffee_production_in_Vietnam2025: Arabica coffee prices hit record highs
Severe drought in Brazil and concerns about coffee supplies drove arabica futures in New York to record nominal prices. In February the benchmark contract rose above the equivalent of $8.80 per kilogram for the first time. The increase raised costs throughout the coffee trade.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_coffee