At Cafés El Magnífico, we want to talk to you again about Arabica coffee. This time, however, we will explain its history and origins. We will also tell you how its seeds travelled to other countries and ended up spreading across the globe.
The expansion of Arabica coffee took it from Ethiopia to Yemen. From there, it spread to India, Java and Réunion. It also reached Amsterdam, the France of Louis XIV and even the American continent.
Take a break and learn about the history of Arabica coffee and its journey of expansion throughout the world. Let’s get started.
Origin of Arabica coffee: seeds and plants in Ethiopia
Coffea Arabica is a flowering perennial plant that produces red or yellow berries when ripe. Once separated from the rest of the fruit and roasted, the seeds are used to prepare the millions and millions of cups that humans drink, appreciate and enjoy every day.
Until recently, the origin of this extraordinary plant was uncertain. Recent studies using modern genetic tools have placed the birth of the Arabica species in the Palaeolithic era, approximately between one million and 500,000 years ago, in the depths of the Ethiopian forests and on the Boma plateau in southern Sudan. A spontaneous hybridisation of Coffea Canephora pollen came into contact with Coffea Eugenioides, creating a new and viable species.
This ancient tree or coffee plant was different from the Arabica we know today. Like its parents, it was a diploid species (2nx2n=22), but between 10,000 and 600,000 years ago, an event called polyploidisation occurred, doubling its chromosomes (2nx2n=44) and making it the only one of the 130 species of the Coffea genus with this characteristic and one of only three that self-pollinates. As a result, C. Arabica inherited low genetic diversity, the lowest of its species and also of all cultivated plants, making it very vulnerable.
By sequencing the genomes of 41 C. Arabica, 2 C. Eugeniodes and 3 C Canephora, scientists have found that 30,000 years ago, the C. Arabica populations on the eastern and western sides of the Rift Valley split. While those on the western side remained wild, the descendants of the plants on the eastern side were taken and cultivated in Yemen.
Arabica coffee arrives in Yemen
Ethiopia therefore had a population of thousands of wild coffee trees, each with its own characteristics, which were harvested at random, not selected or domesticated by humans before being taken to Yemen, probably from the Hararghe region, with which it had intense trade relations. A few seeds therefore gave rise to the population of plants in Yemen, which is a phenomenon that geneticists call a bottleneck, as it resulted in a significant reduction in genetic diversity.
In 1997, carbonised paleobotanical Arabica coffee beans were found in an archaeological excavation in the eastern part of the Arabian Peninsula, near Oman, along with early 13th-century pottery from Yemen dating back to 1200. Since these beans were clearly not found in their place of cultivation, they indicate that coffee was traded at that time. The findings also reveal that the beans came from Yemen and that people knew how to roast them.
The Yemenis learned to grow coffee and, of course, coffee growers made their selections of plants that in Yemen are not called Typica or Bourbon but have names such as the tall-growing Udaini, Jufaini and Jadi coffee trees or the shorter and more compact Dawairi and Tufahi trees.
From Yemen, coffee plants began the journeys that led them to populate the land between the tropics on a planet that was becoming interconnected for the first time and where advances in shipbuilding and navigation techniques were going to meet the needs of a world with a larger population (it doubled between 1450 and 1800), greater wealth and an appetite for new and exotic products.
Responding to a growing demand for coffee (used for establishments where the drink is served in capital letters to distinguish it from the seed in lowercase letters, as recommended by Gómez de la Serna) in Mocha and Cairo towards the end of the 15th century, cultivation spread to various areas of Yemen, which remained the world’s sole supplier for two hundred years until the 17th century, maintaining a monopoly on its cultivation and trade by not allowing seedlings or seeds to leave the country (they could only leave the country roasted or boiled) under penalty of death.
The spread of Arabica coffee around the world: the three routes
Ocean voyages also brought plants to new environments. This is how sugar, coffee, cocoa, tea, corn, potatoes and cotton arrived in America, products known as “overseas goods” that quickly became popular and were grown mainly for sale in Europe. The work was carried out by forced labour, usually African slaves.
Arabica circumnavigated the globe in search of places to be cultivated, taking three routes:
- 1. From Yemen to India
- 2. From Yemen to Bourbon Island (now Réunion)
- 3. A route in which the seeds left Ethiopia without passing through Yemen
1. The Indian route
As we mentioned, seed smuggling was considered a serious crime in Yemen. But in 1670, a Sufi from India named Baba Budan, determined to grow coffee in his country, stole seven seeds (seven is considered a sacred number in Islam) and took them with him to the highlands of Karnataka, where they thrived.
Between 1696 and 1700, the Dutch East India Company transported coffee from the Malabar coast in India to Java in Indonesia. Just six years later, in 1706, a coffee plant was on its way to Amsterdam, where it eventually bore fruit. The mayor of Amsterdam, Nicolaas Witsen, offered one of the plant’s descendants as a gift to King Louis XIV for his birthday, a tree that became famous and was known as the ‘noble tree’ (or tree of nobility).
Fast forward to 1720 or 1723, when King Louis XIV entrusted naval officer Gabriel Mathieu De Clieu with the task of transporting coffee plants to the Caribbean. With De Clieu’s success, coffee soon spread across Latin America, marking the beginning of large-scale coffee production in the region. These plants were believed to be of the Typica variety, which today is one of the most significant coffee cultivars.
Coffee was introduced to Brazil in 1727. Typica was practically the only variety commercially exploited in the country until the mid-19th century, with seeds obtained from the Amsterdam Botanical Garden.
This variety of red fruit was described in 1913 by Cramer, who proposed the name Typica (Coffea arabica L. var. typica Cramer) because it represented the typical characteristics of the C species, Arabica. Mutations of Typica gave rise to cultivars such as Amarelo de Botucatu and Maragogipe. In 1859, the Brazilian government, recognising the importance of coffee cultivation for the country and the need to expand options for more productive varieties, favoured the introduction of red Bourbon.
2. The Yemen-Bourbon Island route and the Bourbon variety
Like the Typica variety, the Bourbon variety also originated in Yemen but followed a different journey. In 1715, the French transported coffee seeds from Yemen to the island then known as Bourbon (named after the French royal dynasty), now known as La Réunion. This is how the variety got its name. Of the sixty plants that began the journey, twenty survived the trip and only one survived planting. For more than a century, Bourbon remained on the island until it was finally introduced to Brazil around 1850, from where it spread throughout Latin America.
After the 1940s, it replaced the Typica variety, which was dominant in Latin America, mainly because it was a more vigorous and productive variety. Some remnants of Typica could still be found in Peru and Jamaica, where the famous Blue Mountain coffee is in fact of the Typica variety.
After its arrival in Brazil, Bourbon also underwent some significant genetic mutations, the most notable being the dwarf mutation, which was discovered around 1915–1918. This mutation was found in the borderlands between the states of Minas Gerais and Espírito Santo. Caturra is a compact, high-yielding cultivar that changed everything by allowing for more intensive coffee farming in full sun. Caturra soon became one of the most economically important coffee varieties in Latin America in the decades that followed.
Most of the varieties grown today around the world come from the Yemeni Typica-Bourbon group. Therefore, Yemen still retains most of the genetic diversity it gave to the world 300 years ago.
3. The third way
Wild coffee trees are still very common in Ethiopia. Forests in the south-west, west, south-east and south regions are home to unique wild coffee trees. These forests have also allowed natural adaptation in these environments for generations; these naturally adapted coffee trees are called ‘landraces’.
Since the formation of the Ethiopian empire in the late 18th century, the central government’s interest in coffee production and export played a significant role in the expansion of coffee farms outside the production system in the forests where coffee had grown wild without human intervention.
Due to the importance of coffee, the tradition of its cultivation expanded in the 19th century. During this time, farmers were responsible for both their own selections of forest varieties and the exchange of indigenous plants among themselves. The coffee-growing communities living in these forests were able to make their own selections from wild coffee trees. The coffee varieties that grow in these forests today were originally obtained from wild trees available in the mountainous rainforests of southwestern Ethiopia.
Similarly, many of the varieties grown today in Guji, Bale and other neighbouring areas are believed to have originated from wild trees in natural forests. In short, coffee farmers preferred natural forests that existed near them as a source of seeds for planting.
In order to utilise Ethiopia’s immense genetic diversity, the government established a national research study called the Jimma Agricultural Research Centre (JARC) on what was a humble agricultural school in the 1950s. In 1967, it received government funding to become the prestigious centre it is today.
In 1970, JARC began its genetic collection, identifying and distributing seeds from regional selections.
In 1941, on the Boma Plateau in Sudan, a botanist documented the selection of coffee trees in the Rume area from the remnants of a wild population, and they have been studied in Uganda, Kenya and Costa Rica. Rume Sudan is mainly used for hybridisation.
The vast majority of wild coffees from south-western Ethiopia have never been used in crossbreeding programmes outside the country. Today, researchers from World Coffee Research, CIRAD and Promecafe, for example, are using them to crossbreed with traditional varieties to create F1 hybrids that take advantage of their vigour and genetic diversity to adapt to a wider range of environments, which is crucial for short-term adaptation to climate change.
From the mid-20th century onwards, geneticists and agronomists intensified their efforts to design cultivars or hybrids that could be used for specific purposes, starting with resistance to rust, yield per hectare and uniform ripening. Today, we would talk about efforts to adapt to climate change.
While in the past seeds could not be exported or imported for fear of disease, today we can find any type of coffee plant in any producing country.
