Coffee — Reading

Passage

A The story every coffee company likes to tell begins with a goat herder. Kaldi, so the legend goes, noticed his animals refusing to sleep after browsing on a particular shrub in the Ethiopian highlands, tried the berries himself, and discovered their effect. The tale first appears in writing in 1671, some six hundred years after the events it describes, which is reason enough to treat it as folklore. What is not in doubt is the geography: Coffea arabica grows wild only in the forests of south-western Ethiopia, and every arabica plant now cultivated anywhere descends from that population. B The first reliable accounts of coffee as a drink come from fifteenth-century Yemen, where Sufi orders used it to stay alert through night prayers. From the port of Mocha it spread across the Arabian peninsula and into the Ottoman empire. Coffee houses followed, and they were not merely places to drink. They hosted music, chess, gossip and argument, and they were closed by the authorities repeatedly on the grounds that men who gathered to talk without wine were harder to govern than men who gathered to drink it. The bans never held for long. C Europe received coffee through Venice in the early seventeenth century and through the Ottoman siege of Vienna later in the same century. London's first coffee house opened in 1652, and within fifty years the city had hundreds. They were nicknamed 'penny universities', because a penny bought entry and the conversation was thought to be an education. Particular houses attracted particular trades — shippers, insurers, booksellers — and at least one, Lloyd's, evolved from a coffee house where marine underwriters met into an insurance market that still bears its founder's name. D For roughly two centuries Yemen guarded its monopoly, exporting only roasted or boiled beans that could not germinate. The monopoly ended, as such monopolies usually do, through smuggling. Seedlings reached Java by way of the Dutch, and a single plant sent from Amsterdam to Paris in 1714 became the ancestor of much of the coffee later grown across the Americas. That narrow genetic origin is not merely a historical curiosity: the arabica grown commercially today is unusually uniform, and uniform crops are unusually vulnerable to disease. E Two species dominate the modern trade. Arabica accounts for around sixty per cent of world production, is grown at altitude, and is prized for acidity and aroma. Robusta grows in hotter lowlands, yields more per hectare, resists disease better and contains roughly twice the caffeine, but tastes harsher and sells for less. The two are not really competitors so much as different products; robusta dominates instant coffee and espresso blends, arabica the speciality market. F Coffee is grown almost entirely in a band between the tropics, and consumed almost entirely outside it. That mismatch has shaped the industry's economics for a century and a half. Prices are set on futures exchanges in New York and London rather than in producing countries, and the share of a retail price that reaches the farmer is small — commonly under ten per cent of what a consumer pays in a café. Certification schemes have attempted to alter this, with contested results: some studies find measurable income gains, others find the certification costs absorb most of the premium. G The threat now most discussed is climate. Arabica is fussy about temperature, and modelling suggests that a substantial share of land currently suitable for it will become unsuitable within decades, pushing cultivation to higher altitudes where there is simply less land available. Responses fall into two camps: breeding programmes seeking hardier arabica varieties or viable hybrids, and renewed interest in the more than one hundred wild Coffea species that were never domesticated. Several of these tolerate heat that would kill arabica. Whether any tastes good enough to sell is a separate question, and largely unanswered. H A parallel shift has taken place at the consumption end of the trade. The specialty coffee movement, sometimes called third-wave, treats coffee less like a commodity and more like wine: single-origin beans, roasters who publish the farm and harvest date, and prices that can run to several times the commodity rate. Its advocates argue that this is the only route to a fair income for growers, since it rewards quality rather than volume. Critics point out that specialty coffee remains a small fraction of total consumption, concentrated in wealthy cities, and that most of the world's coffee is still bought and sold on the same commodity exchanges it has used for a century and a half. Both things are true simultaneously: a genuine niche has grown that pays some farmers substantially more, while the bulk of the crop remains subject to the price volatility that has shaped the industry since coffee first became a traded good. Whether the niche can grow large enough to matter at the scale of the whole trade, rather than remaining a boutique alternative to it, is unresolved.

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