An Overview of How Coffee Cultivation and Consumption Spread Across the World

The exact story of coffee’s earliest entry into the human diet has faded well beyond the reach of history, but modern geneology has given us the ability to trace the origins of the fruit to the western mountains of Ethiopia. What’s clear is that at some point, people took a liking to the fruit of the shade-loving trees growing wild under the forest canopy, and decided to plant the seeds with them where they settled.

In these early days, two species of the coffee plant arose, Arabica and Robusta. The latter is known for its resilience and high caffeine content as much as its more aggressive and unpleasant taste. By comparison, Arabica is known for more delicate flavors, better development of sweetness and acidity, and is also more difficult to grow. As those early lovers of coffee planted coffee, they also accelerated the natural process of creating new varietals. Of these earliest “heirloom” varietals, many sub-varietals emerged through the natural mutation process that we’re all familiar with by picking varieties of apples at the grocery store.

Before the arrival of Europeans to Ethiopia and their introduction to the plant, those varietal differences were less pronounced, but with the boom of colonization in the 18th and 19th centuries, coffee was quickly turned into a cash crop, and a wide range of varietals began to emerge as humans tinkered with the plant, identifying particular plants for their desirable traits (better flavor, disease resistance, etc.) and planting their seedlings en masse. Within a couple hundred years, coffee was planted across the world with dramatic examples of varietal diversity and distinct flavor profiles among them.

Yes, coffee is a tropical fruit. A cherry, in fact. The beverage we know and love doesn’t come from a “bean” at all! What we call a coffee bean is actually one of a pair of seeds which grow at the innermost layer of the fruit. Though coffee cherries have relatively little fruit pulp, even their seeds taste better when the fruit is at its ripest. After the cherries are picked, they are processed into “green coffee” which is then roasted into the more familiar aromatic brown “beans” which we must grind and extract with water to make the beverage we call “coffee.”

Make no mistake, the history of coffee is intertwined with colonization and all the brutality that comes with it. We must acknowledge the role that slavery, exploitation, deforestation, pollution, and other travesties have played in turning coffee into the seemingly innocuous beverage it is today; consumed by the vast majority of people in haste, masked with milk or sugar, with little to no thought given to how it tastes, let alone how this tropical fruit came to be indispensable to their ability to function throughout the day.

Since the late 1900’s people have been pushing to increase distribution of wealth back to coffee origins, intent on helping those involved in the production of coffee toward more equitable compensation. It is not an easy task, as coffee has so often been thought of as complimentary, or “bottomless” and inexpensive by consumers. It can be difficult to convince people to pay more for a cup.

The tenuous promise of “specialty” or high-grade coffee, is that producers are rewarded for better practices on their farms by being compensated with premium payments for quality coffee, enabling those producers to pay more to their workers, invest in their communities, etc. It’s far from a perfect system, but it has delivered in documentable ways, as demand for traceability and impact studies have driven importers to demand higher standards from themselves and the coffee community at large.

The coffee industry is dynamic and rapidly evolving. From quality advancements on the farm to technological advancements in the laboratory, to socio-economic advancements, we’re living in a time where Rwandan coffee farmers are gathering data on their crops via satellite, and experimental techniques in coffee fermentation have actual, seemingly explosive marketability. With the looming threat of climate change, many coffee producers are even working on ways to produce specialty quality Robusta--believe it or not, it exists!-- and the evolution of the coffee industry continues to accelerate.

It takes time, but the boom of the global specialty coffee scene continues to gain speed in the 21st Century, and we are witnessing the slow and steady willingness of the general public to pay attention to what their coffee tastes like and where it comes from.

In the meantime, it’s up to us as roasters and baristas to uphold the higher standard that is the promise of specialty coffee. We are the final stage in every coffee’s journey to the consumer, and if we don’t take seriously the dedication to excellence that drives our industry, we threaten to sabotage the hard work of so many who’ve worked to use coffee for good in this world. As it turns out, great coffee really is delicious, and people can’t help but love delicious things. If you follow some easy to live by rules, it’s easy to reproduce quality coffee every time you make it.