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THE COFFEE ENCYCLOPEDIAThe World's Largest Free Coffee Reference250 Books • 5,000+ Articles • Images, Videos & Infographics☕ Proudly Sponsored by PuertoRicoCoffeeShop.com Search 5,000+ Coffee ArticlesUse the search bar at the top of the page to explore the wo...

Summary According to popular legend, coffee was discovered around the 9th century by an Ethiopian goat herder named Kaldi, who noticed his goats became energetic and playful after eating the red cherries of a certain tree. Kaldi tried the cherries himself, fel...

Summary Ethiopia is universally recognized as the birthplace of coffee, where the Coffea arabica plant first evolved in the highland forests of the Kaffa region more than a thousand years ago. Today, Ethiopia remains one of the world's most important coffee pr...

Summary Before coffee became the world's favorite morning drink, it was a sacred tool used by Sufi Muslim mystics in Yemen to stay alert during their all-night prayers and spiritual practices. In the 15th century, Sufi monks discovered that coffee allowed them...

Summary Yemen was the first country to cultivate coffee on a commercial scale and the world's sole coffee exporter for nearly two hundred years, from the 15th through the 17th centuries. The Yemeni port of Mocha on the Red Sea became so synonymous with coffee ...

Summary Coffee entered the Ottoman Empire in the mid-1500s and was quickly embraced as a cultural obsession, with Istanbul becoming the world's most important coffee city within a generation. The Ottomans invented the coffeehouse as a social and political inst...

Summary Coffee first entered Europe through Venice in the early 1600s via trade routes from the Ottoman Empire, sparking a cultural revolution that would reshape European intellectual, political, and commercial life. Within a century, coffeehouses had spread t...

The Dutch Coffee Empire was the chain of botanical theft, colonial cultivation, and trans-oceanic propagation that broke the Yemeni-Ottoman monopoly on coffee and made the bean a global commodity. Between 1616 and 1706, Dutch East India Company merchants smug...

Gabriel Mathieu de Clieu was a French naval officer who, in 1723, smuggled a single coffee seedling from the royal botanical gardens in Paris to the Caribbean island of Martinique. The voyage took weeks, encountered Barbary pirates, survived a near-shipwreck,...

Summary Coffee arrived in Puerto Rico in 1736, brought by Martinique colonists seeking new plantation opportunities in Spanish Caribbean territories. The island's mountainous interior, volcanic soil, and tropical climate proved ideal for coffee cultivation, le...

Between 1800 and 1898, Puerto Rico built one of the most respected coffee industries in the world — and then lost it in a single decade. At its height the island was the sixth-largest exporter of high-grade coffee on earth, its mountains covered by more than ...

On August 8, 1899, Hurricane San Ciriaco crossed Puerto Rico and ended the island's era as a world coffee power. The storm killed more people than any other hurricane in Puerto Rican history, destroyed the coffee harvest weeks before it was due to be picked, ...

Summary Between 1898 and 1950, Puerto Rico's coffee industry struggled through a half-century of political transition, economic upheaval, and natural disasters under American rule. US tariff policies and sugar-favoring economic strategies pushed coffee from i...

Summary From its diminished mid-20th-century state, Puerto Rican coffee has undergone a remarkable multi-decade renaissance driven by variety innovation, specialty coffee culture, passionate young farmers, and sheer resilience in the face of devastating hurric...

Yauco is the most internationally recognised of Puerto Rico's coffee municipalities, and the reason is partly geography and partly history. Its mountains sit at the right altitude, its Corsican settlers built an export industry there in the nineteenth century...

Summary Adjuntas, tucked into the central highlands of Puerto Rico at the heart of the Cordillera Central, has earned its nickname "La Suiza de Puerto Rico" — the Switzerland of Puerto Rico — for its cool mountain climate and dramatic alpine-like scenery. The ...

Summary Lares holds a unique place in Puerto Rican history and coffee culture. This western mountain municipality was the site of the 1868 Grito de Lares, the historic revolutionary uprising for Puerto Rican independence from Spain, making Lares the symbolic h...

Summary Jayuya occupies Puerto Rico's highest mountain terrain, home to Cerro de Punta — the island's tallest peak at 1,338 meters — and some of the most elevated coffee farms in the Caribbean. This altitude gives Jayuya coffee a distinctive density and flavor...