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THE COFFEE ENCYCLOPEDIA A Free Coffee Library for the Whole World Coffee history, recipes and traditions, from Ethiopian origins to your morning café con leche. For coffee drinkers everywhere, with special depth on Puerto Rico. 58 Books • 135 Articles • Images...

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 Coffee was first grown as a crop in Yemen, from seeds taken out of the coffee forests of southwestern Ethiopia. The earliest reliable evidence of coffee drinking comes from Sufi circles in Yemen in the fifteenth century. For the next two centuries Yeme...

Summary Coffee reached the Ottoman Empire in the first half of the sixteenth century, and Istanbul's first coffeehouses opened in the year 962 of the Islamic calendar, which ran from late 1554 to late 1555. The coffeehouse itself was not an Ottoman invention: ...

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...

Photo: Hendrick Cornelisz Vroom / Wikimedia Commons, public domain. 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 commod...

Photo: Joseph Vernet / Wikimedia Commons, public domain. 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,...

A coffee tree in flower in the Maricao mountains, Puerto Rico. Photo: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Southeast Region / Wikimedia Commons, public domain. Summary Coffee arrived in Puerto Rico in 1736, brought by Martinique colonists seeking new plantation oppo...

Photo: Library of Congress, Chronicling America / Wikimedia Commons, public domain, cropped. 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 t...

Photo: Library of Congress / Wikimedia Commons, public domain. 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, destr...

Coffee pickers near Corozal, Puerto Rico, December 1941. Photo: Jack Delano, U.S. Farm Security Administration. Library of Congress, LC-DIG-fsa-8a37457. No known restrictions. Summary When Spain ceded Puerto Rico to the United States in 1898, coffee was the is...

Summary Since 1950, Puerto Rican coffee has become much smaller in land and in number of farms. It has been struck by hurricanes, among them Georges in 1998, María in 2017 and Fiona in 2022, and by coffee leaf rust, first detected on the island in 1989. Each t...

Photo: Unknown author / Wikimedia Commons, public domain. 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...

Summary Adjuntas is a mountain municipality in the Cordillera Central of Puerto Rico, inside the island's coffee zone. It was founded on August 11, 1815, and is known as "La Suiza de Puerto Rico", the Switzerland of Puerto Rico, for its cool climate and mounta...

Photo: Norma Arbelo Irizarry / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.5. 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 P...

View of roadway from Cerro de Punta, on 6 April 2008. Photo: Steven Isaacson / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0. Summary Jayuya is a mountain municipality in the Cordillera Central, at the centre of Puerto Rico. It is home to Cerro de Punta, the island's highes...