Where does our coffee come from?

Let's start with a big fable in coffee land. There is a big misunderstanding that we are about to clear up, because coffee does not originate from Italy. Many people think that coffee originates in Italy, but nothing could be further from the truth. We can assure you that not a single plantation can be found in Italy, but the Italians have shaped the coffee culture as we know it today.

The coffee plant grows to be exact between the Tropic of Capricorn and Tropic of Cancer. This is a small circle parallel to the earth, the tropics indicate the maximum distance between the sun and the equator, also the tropic is the split between summer and winter in the hemispheres of our earth.

Coffee was probably discovered by humans in the kingdom of Kaffa (now Ethiopia). The coffee bean there was called Buna, bunn or bunchum. There are also several legends about the discovery of coffee, from shepherds and scholars to clerics who supposedly discovered the bean. The fact is, trading and drinking coffee became big because of the Arab world. It was only later in the ^17th century that the Dutch East India Company also brought coffee to Java, Sri Lanka and South America, where coffee culture took off in 2018. Thus, production quickly spread to most tropical areas. We, the Dutch were also reportedly the first traders to bring coffee to Europe on a large scale.

Beautiful Amsterdam is thus said to have become the first important international coffee trading center. Later in the ^18th century, a Frenchman managed to smuggle the coffee plant to the Caribbean, then it was also smuggled to Brazil. After this, Brazil became the largest coffee producer in the world. Because of the large quantities of coffee, the price dropped tremendously, this turned coffee from an elite beverage to a beverage for the entire population. Since then, the largest coffee producing countries are; Brazil, Vietnam, Indonesia, Colombia and India.