CIRCA 1000
Coffee beans are first cultivated and brewed in Arabia by Arab traders. Coffee spreads with Islam to the Mediterranean, North Africa, and India.

1453-1475
Ottoman Turks introduce coffee to Constantinople and the world’s first coffee shop is opened.

CIRCA 1600
Baba Budan, an Indian smuggler-pilgrim, brings fertile coffee seeds from Mecca to India, The coffee plants from these seeds start a growth of coffee production that soon reaches European colonies.

1600
In Italy, Pope Clement VIII makes coffee an acceptable ”Christian” beverage.

1645
The first coffee house opens in Italy.

1652
The first coffee house opens in England.

1668
Coffee surpasses beer as New York’s City’s favorite breakfast drink.

1672
The first coffee house opens in Paris.

1675
A Viennese man named Franz Georg Kolschitzky opens central Europe’s first coffee house. He is known for starting the practice of adding cream and sugar to coffee.

1713
Louis XIV receives a coffee tree from the Dutch for his royal garden in Paris, Jardin des Plantes.

1721
The first coffee house opens Berlin.

1723
French naval officer Gabriel Mathieu de Clieu, requests clipping from the coffee tree in Paris to start new plants in the Caribbean French colony, Martinique. He is denied, so he raids the garden to take a seeding from the tree with him back to Martinique.

1723-1770
At Martinique, de Clieu plants the seeding which eventually produces approximately 18 million coffee trees within 50 years. This coffee would eventually make its way to Latin America.

1727
Brazil wittingly steals coffee tree seeding from French Guiana, and thus their coffee industry was born.

1800
Brazil becomes the world’s greatest coffee empire and makes coffee commercially available to the masses.

1830
Brazil is followed by Cuba, Java, and Haiti as the world’s largest producers of coffee, producing up to 450,000 bags a year.

1920
Coffee sales increase in the U.S as the prohibition goes into effect.

1940
70% of the world’s coffee produce is imported into the US.

1971
Starbucks starts a revolution over fresh-roasted whole bean coffee and opens its first store in Pike Place, Seattle.