Coffee hits the spot: How coffee changed the world - by Tom Oder

Hundreds of years before Starbucks became a hot spot for making social and business connections over lattes and laptops, thriving coffeehouses of a much different type were widely popular in the Arab world.

Those first coffeehouses were in the holy city of Mecca in present-day Saudi Arabia. Nothing like them had ever existed.

These were public places, known as kaveh kanes, where people gathered for the same reasons they go to Starbucks today, for coffee and conversation, to discover and share the news of the day, and to conduct business. They also enjoyed music, but not through earbuds plugged into mobile devices, of course.

Those early Arabian coffeehouses were vibrant places that pulsated with singing and dancing performers gyrating to the rhythm of Middle Eastern music.

Then, as now, thousands of pilgrims from all over the world visited Mecca each year. When they returned home in those long ago times, they took with them stories about the "wine of Araby," as coffee was once called. But Arab leaders didn't want to lose their monopoly on the coffee trade.

To prevent coffee from being cultivated elsewhere and to make sure that stories were all the pilgrims took home, the imams banned the export of coffee beans. Dutch traders circumvented these export restrictions in 1616, and the world hasn't been the same since.

What is known from historical records is that the first substantiated knowledge of the wonders of the coffee tree or the drinking of coffee occurred in the mid-15th century in the Sufi monasteries of Yemen. The Arabs were not only the first to cultivate coffee and the first to turn coffee beans into a drinkable liquid but also the first to begin the coffee trade. By the sixteenth century, coffee was known in Persia, Egypt, Syria and Turkey.

By the late 1600s, the Dutch started growing coffee outside of the Arab world, first in a failed attempt at Malabar in India and then, in 1699, in Batavia in Java in what is now Indonesia. It didn't take long before Dutch colonies became the main suppliers of coffee to Europe, where people had heard stories from travelers to the Near East of an unusual black beverage.

The first coffeehouses outside of the Ottoman Empire appeared in Europe in Venice in 1629. The first coffeehouse opened in England in Oxford in 1652, and by 1675 there were more than 3,000 coffeehouses in the country. Lloyd's of London was Edward Lloyd's Coffee House, before it was a global insurance company.

The first coffeehouse opened in Paris in 1672 and then perhaps the city's most famous coffeehouse, Café Procope, opened in 1686 (sketched at right in 1743). It was a popular meeting place during the French Enlightenment, arguably the birthplace of the encyclopedia and is still open today.

Interestingly, coffee wasn't popular at first with everyone in Europe. Some called it the "bitter invention of Satan," and the clergy in Venice condemned it. Pope Clement VIII was asked to intervene and, finding it to his liking, gave coffee Papal approval.

Customs of the day did not always approve of women in coffeehouses. Women were banned from many of these early European coffeehouses, particularly in England and France. Germany, however, did allow women to frequent them.

The first coffeehouses in the New World appeared in the mid-1600s in New York, Philadelphia, Boston and other towns of the British colonies. Even so, tea was the preferred drink. That changed forever when the colonists revolted against King George in 1773 by dumping tea into Boston Harbor during the Boston Tea Party, which was planned in a coffeehouse, the Green Dragon. Both the New York Stock Exchange and the Bank of New York started in coffeehouses in what is today known as Wall Street.

Read more: How coffee changed the world | MNN - Mother Nature Network

Italian Caffè Sospeso: EU Embraces 'Suspended Coffee': Pay It Forward With A Cup Of Joe - by Sylvia Poggioli

Tough economic times and growing poverty in much of Europe are reviving a humble tradition that began some one-hundred years ago in the Italian city of Naples. It's called caffè sospeso — "suspended coffee": A customer pays in advance for a person who cannot afford a cup of coffee.

The Neapolitan writer Luciano de Crescenzo used the tradition as the title of one of his books, : Saggezza quotidiana in piccoli sorsi ("Suspended coffee: Daily wisdom in small sips"). "It was a beautiful custom," he recalls. "When a person who had a break of good luck entered a cafe and ordered a cup of coffee, he didn't pay just for one, but for two cups, allowing someone less fortunate who entered later to have a cup of coffee for free."

The barista would keep a log, and when someone popped his head in the doorway of the cafe and asked, "Is there anything suspended?" the barista would nod and serve him a cup of coffee ... for free.

It's an elegant way to show generosity: an act of charity in which donors and recipients never meet each other, the donor doesn't show off and the recipient doesn't have to show gratitude.

Read more: EU Embraces 'Suspended Coffee': Pay It Forward With A Cup Of Joe : The Salt : NPR

The Jakarta Post: Love and coffee: Two things I could not live without - by Janet DeNeefe

For the complete report from the The Jakarta Post click on this link

Love and coffee: Two things I could not live without - by Janet DeNeefe

Coffee in Bali has always been synonymous with chatting and no subject is taboo when armed with this precious brew. It opens the debate on all subjects from lovers to loans, from religion to rice fields. It has even been said to have played a part in world revolutions: Che Guevara drank coffee. For more than half a millennium, the fabled story of coffee as a beverage has been far more than just a drink. The dark liquid coaxed from the roasted beans of the Coffea Arabica tree still commands the attention of corporate executives, world leaders and an ever-increasing number of the global population. Legend has it that coffee was first cultivated in Ethiopia 1000 AD and then made its way to Yemen where members of the Sufi sect began consuming it regularly.

As with so many exotic ingredients in Bali, coffee is not native to the island. It was introduced to Indonesia by the Dutch, who transplanted - or smuggled - the trees from Yemen and cultivated them in the highlands of Java in the 1700s. After all, colonialism was always about trade and monopolizing world commodities. Sound familiar? By 1732, Indonesia was producing around 2.3 million pounds of coffee annually. It eventually became the drink of the masses. At a later stage, coffee trees were planted in Singaraja and Kintamani. Warung kopi were the original coffee houses for locals. In the early days, there was a certain quaint rustic charm about them, a touch of Balinese bohemia that became even more poetic at night under the light of a kerosene lamp. You could plan a revolution there, plot any kind of mayhem or discuss all things political. It was like a primitive Internet cafe or CNN with daily news updates, fired with a certain kind of liberalism that safely existed beyond the palace walls.

Commodity on line: Coffee: Remembrance of a brew - by Rakesh Kumar

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Coffee: Remembrance of a brew - by Rakesh Kumar

Most of the people in India feel that Coffee, Cappuccino or even Café Mocha, is a western drink or is associated with our South Indian friends. The origin of coffee, however, is in Ethopia and it was the Arabs who used to drink this as their favourite drink. Hundreds of years ago, in the district of Kaffa in Ethiopia, farmers observed that their goats became lively and active after chewing red berries from the coffee plant. They then tried themselves and thus began the journey of coffee from Africa. Initially, it was restricted to Ethiopia but then it went to Sudan and from their to the famous Mocha port of Yemen in 15th century. The word 'Café Mocha' is derived from the port of Yemen where coffee was traded in large volumes then and even now. The western world, however, was not aware of the drink because Arab world kept the coffee secret closely and never allowed the seeds or beans to be exported or get it smuggled out of their territory. The same policy was followed by Muslim Ottoman Empire of Turks who kept a tight control over the coffee trade. In fact, the first-ever coffee house that opened up in the world was in Islam's holiest city of Mecca in 15th century before it caught the fancy of western world. By the beginning of the 16th century, the Dutch (citizens of Holland) were able to get the beans and got to know how to produce coffee.