A New World Order with Room for Cream

A New World Order with room for Cream

As I was standing in line at a local coffee shop this past weekend I overheard the person in front of me order a "skinny caramel macchiato with an extra shot at 180 degrees and two Splendas," and I immediately started laughing under my breath. I then ordered my "coffee flavored coffee" and sat down at one of the tables and happily started to enjoy my almost too hot beverage. I, like many people, am no stranger to coffeehouses. I love the aroma that hits you as soon as you walk through the doors and the sense of social interactions that spur from these enjoyable settings. Coffeehouses are often referred to as the third place, separate from the two usual social environments of home and the work place. This leads me to ask, how old is the third place trend of coffeehouses?

The birth of coffee is believed to have cultivated in the 9th century when an Ethiopian goatherd, Kaldi, noticed his flock acting unusually energetic after eating a certain berry. Kaldi then tried the berries himself and after realizing its stimulating powers quickly spread the news. However, written history about coffee did not surface until the 17th century, making the story of Kaldi and his goats more of an apocryphal than anything else (www.ico.org).

A better supported theory of the start of coffee is the when slaves during the fifteenth century, taken from present day Sudan, carried coffee cherries with them into Yemen and Arabia through the port of Mocha. It was through these small introductions that quickly lead to the cultivation of coffee in the region. Mocha, now synonymous with coffee, was the main sea port for Mecca at the time, thus contributing to elixirs growing momentum. It was Mecca's coffee craze boom that rolled out the red carpet for the first coffeehouses known as kaveh kanes. These establishments we elaborately decorated and almost immediately became a third place environment for many people (www.ico.org). As popular as the coffeehouses were the Arabs remained reluctant to allow the export of fertile coffee beans, so as to keep the cultivation of coffee from occurring elsewhere (www.ico.org). The first cups of joe were a chi-like drink known as "qahwah" and is believed to be the source of the modern word, coffee (Wikipedia). Love of this heavenly drink even gave way to a Turkish law that allowed women to divorce their husbands if they were not provided with their daily quota of coffee (Meyers).

In 1616, the Dutch successfully acquired some live coffee trees and brought them to Java, then the colonial Dutch East Indies, and what is now modern day Indonesia. The warmer Indonesian climate provided the perfect breeding ground for coffee trees and in the span of a few years the Dutch colonies became Europe's main supplier creating coffee's nickname, java. Today Indonesia is one of the world's