Coffee originated on the plateaus of central Ethiopia. By A.D. 1000, Ethiopian Arabs were collecting the fruit of the tree, which grew wild, and preparing a beverage from its beans. During the fifteenth century traders Trans planted wild coffee trees from Africa to southern Arabia. The eastern Arabs, the first to cultivate coffee, soon adopted the Ethiopian Arabs’ practice of making a hot beverage from its ground, roasted beans.

The Arabs’ fondness for the drink spread rapidly along trade routes, and Venetians had been introduced to coffee by 1600. In Europe as in Arabia, church and state officials frequently proscribed the new drink, identifying it with the often-liberal discussions conducted by coffee house habitue, but the institutions nonetheless prolifolited nowhere more so than in seventeenth-century London. The first coffee house opened there in 1652, and a large number of such establishments (cafe’s) opened soon after on both the European continent (cafe derives from the French term for coffee) and in North America, where they appeared in such Eastern cities as New York, Boston, and Philadelphia in the last decade of the seventeenth century.

In the United States, coffee achieved the same, almost instantmenil popularity that it had won in Europe. However, the brew favored by early American coffee drinkers tasted significantly different from that enjoyed by today’s connoisseurs, as nineteenth-century cookbooks make clear. One 1844 cookbooks instructed people to use a much higher coffee/water ratio than we favor today (one per sixteenounes); boil the brew for almost a half an hour (today people are instructed never to boil coffee); and add fish skin, (a made from the air bladders of fish), or egg shells to reduce the acidity brought out by boiling the beans so long (today we would discard overly acidic coffee). Coffee yielded from this recipe would strike modern coffee lovers as intolerably strong and acidic; moreover, it would have little aroma

American attempts to create instant coffee began during the mid-1800s, when one of the earliest instant coffees was offered in cake form to Civil War troops. Although it and other early instant coffees tasted even worse than regular coffee of the epoch, the incentive of convenience proved strong, and efforts to manufacture a palatable instant brew continued. Finally, after using U.S. troops as testers during World War II, an American coffee manufacturer (Maxwell House) began marketing the first successful instant coffee in 1950.

At present, 85 percent of Americans begin their day by making some form of the drink, and the average American will consume three cups of it over the course of the day.