Coffee

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UN 1 VER.SITY

Of ILLINOIS

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L161 — O-1096

COFFEE

BY

B. E. DAHLGREN
Chief Curator, Department op Botany

HE UBRARV OF THE

JUN201938

DIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS

Botany
Leaflet 22

FIELD MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY

CHICAGO

1938

The Botanical Leaflets of Field Museum are designed to give
brief, non-technical accounts of various features of plant life, especially
with reference to the botanical exhibits in Field Museum, and of the
local flora of the Chicago region.

LIST OF BOTANICAL LEAFLETS ISSUED TO DATE

No. 1. Figs $ .10

No. 2. The Coco Palm 10

No. 3. Wheat 10

No. 4, Cacao 10

No. 5. A Fossil Flower 10

No. 6. The Cannon-ball Tree .10

No. 7. Spring Wild Flowers 25

No. 8. Spring and Early Summer Wild Flowers . . .25

No. 9. Summer Wild Flowers 25

No. 10. Autumn Flowers and Fruits 25

No. 11. Common Trees (second edition) 25

No. 12. Poison Ivy 15

No. 13. Sugar and Sugar-making 25

No. 14. Indian Corn 25

No. 15. Spices and Condiments (second edition) ... .25

No. 16. Fifty Common Plant Galls of the Chicago Area .25

No. 17. Common Weeds 25

No. 18. Common Mushrooms 50

No. 19. Old-Fashioned Garden Flowers 25

No. 20. House Plants 35

No. 21. Tea 25

No. 22. CoflPee 25

CLIFFORD C. GREGG, Director

FIELD MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY
CHICAGO, U. S. A.

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COFFEE TREE IN FLOWER

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Field Museum of Natural History

DEPARTMENT OF BOTANY
Chicago, 1938

^1^ Leaflet Number 22

Copyright 1938 by Field Museum of Natural History
*o

COFFEE
Origin and History of Coffee Drinking

The coffee tree is of African origin but makes its first

appearance as a cultivated plant in the southwestern

corner of the Arabian peninsula. The first positive account

of it is found in an Arabic manuscript of the fifteenth

century. It was then being grown in the mountains of

Yemen on the eastern border of the Red Sea, probably

having been introduced by Abyssinian invaders one or

two hundred years before. The fact that coffee is not

mentioned in the Koran supports the belief that its pre-

iT vious history in Arabia had been relatively short. It is

<• thought to have come into common use there only in the

S fourteenth century.

In the absence of historical information Arabic legends

, attribute its introduction to various Musulman personages

* famous for their merits or for their devotions, such as the

Sheikh Shadili of Mocha, the patron saint of Moham-

S- medan coffee merchants, or the Mufty Gemaleddin, who,

^ having seen coffee drunk in Persia, made use of it himself

and introduced the custom in Aden.

SL A well-known story from Syria, many times retold,

is of the monastery goatherd whose charges became lively

. ^ to the point of refusing their customary siesta after brows-

""ti. ing on the leaves and the fruit of a strange bush, and of

the Mollah conceiving the idea of trying its effect on his

monks who were given to somnolence at evening prayers.

The fact that the coffee tree grows wild in various

parts of Africa, especially in the mountains of Southern

Abyssinia, where it has undoubtedly been used since

1

2 Field Museum of Natural History

ancient times and is now gathered for export from wild
plants, was not discovered until the European exploration
of Africa was begun. In the meantime coffee remained
definitely associated only with Arabia. The Arabic name,
like the Abyssinian, for the tree, bun or el-bunn, is applied
also to the fruit and even to the coffee powder. The
Arabic name for the brew is kahwa, from which come the
word coffee and its variants in European languages. The
scientific designation of the plant, Coffea arabica, was con-
ferred upon it by Linnaeus in 1756. If its African origin
had been known to the great classifier, he would probably
have called it abyssinica or ethiopica.

The existence of various other species of coffee, grow-
ing wild in Africa, is of relatively recent discovery. Many
of these have been tried in cultivation and a few of them
are being grown on a large scale, but the so-called Arabian
coffee remains by far the most important and most widely
planted species.

The use of the dark brown brew as a social and cere-
monial beverage apparently originated and developed in
Arabia. At first the drink of the learned and religious
only, it gradually came into general use. The manner of
its preparation and serving there is described by Doughty
in his Arabia Secreta.

"In every coffee sheykh's tent there is a new fire
blown in the hearth, and he sets in his coffee pots; then
snatching a coal in his fingers he will lay it in his tobacco-
pipe. A few coffee beans received from his housewife are
roasted and brayed; as all is boiling he sets out the little
cups, fenjeyl (for fenjeyn) which we saw have been made,
for the uningenious Arabs, in the West. The roasted
beans are pounded amongst Arabs with a magnanimous
rattle . . . and (as all their labour) rhythmical — in brass
of the town, of an old wooden mortar, gayly studded with
nails, the work of some nomad smith. The water bubbling
in the small dellal, he cast in his fine coffee powder,
el-bunn, and withdraws the pot to simmer a moment.

Coffee 8

From the knot in his kerchief he takes then an head of
cloves, a piece of cinnamon or other spice, baJiar, and
braying these, he casts their dust in after. Soon he pours
some hot drops to essay his coffee; if the taste be to his
Hking, making dextrously a nest of all the cups in his
hand, with pleasant clattering, he is ready to pour out
for the company, and begins upon his right hand; and
first, if such be present, to any considerable sheykh and
principal persons.

"The fenjeyn kahwa is but four sips: to fill it up to a
guest, as in the northern towns, were among Beduins an
injury, and of such bitter meaning, "Drink thou and
depart."

In the middle of the fifteenth century, coffeehouses
were found in all important Arabian towns. With the
caravan trade and the annual pilgrimages to Mecca, its
use soon spread to the rest of the Mahommedan world,
across the Persian Gulf and to northern India, and north-
ward to Cairo, Egypt (1500), Syria, and to Stamboul
(1554).

As popular gathering places where the idle could
gossip and amuse themselves, where officials, officers,
traders, merchants and navigators talked politics, the
coffeehouses almost everywhere incurred the displeasure
of the muftis and ulemans who saw their mosques empty,
and often also of the civil authorities who scented potential
danger in political discussions and possible intrigues.
Coffee was praised by its friends for its excellent qualities.
It would quicken the wit, restore the weary, comfort the
body, enable the religious to spend the night in devotions,
etc. It was condemned by its enemies as contrary to
the teachings of the Koran, as being, if not wine, certainly
charcoal, and equally objectionable. The coffeehouses
were closed in Mecca in 1511, wrecked in Cairo in 1534^
forbidden repeatedly in Constantinople.

In Persia, each coffeehouse was supplied with an
official teacher and expounder of the law. The Sultan

4 Field Museum of Natural History

Selim I, who greatly extended the Ottoman Empire,
thereby furthering the spread of coffee, reversed the decree
against it. He is said to have hanged two Persian doctors
for maintaining it to be injurious to health, but his succes-
sors closed all coffeehouses in the Ottoman Empire and
in 1633 coffee and tobacco were forbidden under pain
of death. The use of both survived, however, the follow-
ing thirty years of prohibition, and after 1663 coffeehouses
were again permitted to operate in Turkey but were
licensed. In Cairo there were then two thousand shops
in which coffee was served.

Mocha was long the chief center of the coffee trade
and for two hundred years Arabia retained a monopoly
of the supply.

From Constantinople the use of coffee found its way
to Italy early in the seventeenth century. It is said to
have appeared in Venice in 1624 and the following year
in Rome. A Venetian, Mocangi, "pevere," was the first
European vender.

In France, Marseille was the first city to receive coffee
in bales from Egypt and the first to have a coffeehouse.
Pascal, an Armenian, opened the first cafe in Paris, where
his master, the Turkish Ambassador, at his receptions
had dispensed coffee Turkish style, intriguing the French
aristocrats, more interested in the manner of its serving
than in "the Turks berry drink." Pascal's attempt was
not a great success, but more luxurious establishments
came into existence, the most famous of them being
"Caf4 Procope," so named from its proprietor, and "Caf^
de la R^gence." The most illustrious literary and political
characters of France were frequenters of one or other of
these. "He imagines himself a person of importance
because he goes every day to the Procope," wrote Voltaire
of one of his contemporaries. He himself was a constant
patron, as were Rousseau, Diderot, Marat, Robespierre,
and Danton. Bonaparte is said to have been obliged to

Coffee 6

leave his hat there for security, while he went in search
of cash to pay his bill.

At the Caf6 de la R^gence, Voltaire appeared also and
Diderot was to be seen working on his encyclopedia.
Rousseau, Richelieu, Buffon, Alfred de Musset, Victor
Hugo, and Th^ophile Gautier were among its frequenters.

Caf^s multiplied, hundreds of less important ones
were opened — all meeting places for the idle or those with
some leisure for playing chess or cards, for discussion and
oratory, and sometimes for dissension and intrigue. At
the Caf^ Foy began the harangue that initiated the siege
of the Bastille.

It has been said that the whole of Paris, with eighteen
hundred coffeehouses, became one vast caf^and the whole
of France, the Caf^ de I'Europe.

In England coffee is thought to have been sold first
at Oxford in 1650 by Jacob, a Jew from Lebanon. A
London merchant having brought coffee from Smyrna,
and a Greek or Armenian servant who understood its
roasting and preparation, opened a coffeehouse in 1652.
Arthur Tilyard's coffeehouse at Oxford dating from 1655
became at once a center of intellectual life. Out of the
informal meetings and discussions which took place among
its frequenters grew the Royal Society. In London, coffee-
houses soon became numerous and by 1675 they numbered
three thousand. Every rank and profession, "every shade
of religious and political opinions had its own head-
quarters," says Edward Forbes Robinson in his Early
History of Coffee Houses in England. Charles II denounced
them as "seminaries of sedition" and issued a proclama-
tion against them which aroused so much protest that
it was rescinded within a few days. Some of the more
exclusive ones eventually developed into clubs. Lloyd's
coffeehouse for wayfarers and traders, where maritime
bulletins were posted for the benefit of customers, became
the world-renowned underwriting establishment and

6 Field Museum of Natural History

register of shipping which is still an important factor in
England's navigation and trade.

Almost from the beginning of the introduction of
coffee into Europe, Holland played an important part in
its trade and cultivation. Dutch traders visited Aden
in Arabia in 1614 and brought home the first samples
of coffee. A commercial shipment from Mocha arrived
in Amsterdam in 1640 and regular imports from Arabia
were established 1660. The first coffeehouse is said to
have been opened in Holland (1666) fifteen years later
than in England, and in the nearby German free port of
Hamburg in 1679. Coffee drinking was somewhat slow
in becoming established in Germany, but it gradually
spread there to such an extent that a hundred years
after its first introduction, Frederick the Great is said to
have exclaimed: "The increase in consumption of coffee
is deplorable — almost every commoner and peasant has
acquired the coffee habit. If that were restricted to some
extent, the people would again resort to beer, and that
would naturally benefit their own breweries. It would
also prevent so much money, spent to purchase coffee,
from going out of the country. Even His Royal Highness
himself, in his younger days, was raised on beer-soup,
besides, it is much better for their health than coffee."

In Austria the Turks, on abandoning the siege of
Vienna in 1683, left behind a large supply of coffee to
which they had set fire. The hero of the moment, a Pole
who had been in Turkey and apparently was the only one
who understood the nature of the smoke emanating from
the sacks on fire, requested them as part of the reward
for his services which saved the city and made use of the
supply to open a coffeehouse, the first in Austria. Vienna
coffeehouses became famous and remained distinguished
for their high character. With daily papers and periodicals,
native and foreign, supplied by the management and
offering their patrons conveniences for correspondence.

BRAZILIAN COFFEE TREE IN FRUIT

JUSSIEU'S ILLUSTRATION OF A COFFEE BRANCH

Coffee 7

they became an extremely important factor in the social
and intellectual life of the town.

Coffee eventually reached Russia from Austria and
from Constantinople, but owing to its high price it never
attained as general use there as in other European coun-
tries. In the eighteenth century it finally reached the
Scandinavian peninsula, where its present day household
consumption is even greater than that of Holland.

A mortar for braying coffee came to New England in
the Mayflower, being brought by the parents of Peregrine
White. The Dutch brought coffee to New Amsterdam
in 1668. William Penn bought his coffee in the New York
market, paying 18 shillings six pence or $4.68 per pound.
The first coffeehouse in Boston was opened in 1869, in
New York in 1696. Being usually taverns, rather than
caf^s, the American coffeehouses never attained the
popularity or social importance of those in Europe. On
the other hand, coffee as a beverage for household use
grew rapidly in favor.

The Arabian Coffee Plant

cultivation, harvesting, and preparation of the crop

The Arabian coffee plant is a shrub or small tree of
the Madder Family, Rubiaceae, with glossy, deep green,
simple leaves, opposite in alternating pairs. Not being
shed annually, the leaves are often said to be evergreen.
As a matter of fact, they have been found to have a life
of three to five years. The main branches are arranged
in pairs at right angles to the straight, perpendicular
stem, each pair of primary branches at right angles to
the next. The secondary branches arising from them are
seen to be given off at an acute angle and to assume
their position in a horizontal plane. During the flowering
periods, of which there are generally two each year, a
principal one lasting two to three months and a secondary
one, each ideally corresponding to a season of relatively
little rainfall, the coffee trees become covered with delicate.

8

Field Museum of Natural History

white flowers, giving off a jasmine-like odor. They are
borne in the leaf-axils of the leaves the preceding year,
in small clusters, each consisting of three to four umbels
of a few flowers or buds. Details of the structure of the

Coffee flower and fruit {Coffea arabiea) enlarged (x5). Half of the tubular
corolla and of the ovary removed to show the pistil and the two ovules in the ovary
which becomes the two-seeded coffee fruit. Below, fruit natural size in vertical section,
and enlarged in transverse section to show relative position of seed, seedcoat, parch-
ment and pulp.

flowers are to be seen in the adjoining illustration. Each
flower lasts only a short time, at most two days, after
which the tubular 5-parted corolla with the stamens is
shed. The fruit develops rather slowly, the production
of the ripe, two-seeded drupe, usually called a berry,
requiring eight to nine months.

Coffee 9

The ovary of the flower is two-celled, with one ovule
in each cell. Each ovule normally develops into a so-
called coffee "bean," a seed with a delicate membranous
seed coat, the so-called silver skin of the coffee bean. As
the fruit develops, the wall of the ovary enlarges greatly
to form the pericarp of the drupe. At the time of maturity,
this consists mostly of a fleshy and mucilaginous pulp
(mesocarp), covered externally with a dark red "skin"
or epiderm (epicarp). The internal wall of the ovary, i.e.
that part of it lining the cells or cavities in which the seeds
develop (endocarp), becomes quite hard and horny, like
the seed-house in an apple, though somewhat firmer,
forming the so-called parchment which, after the removal
of the fleshy pulp, is seen to enclose each coffee bean.
Within the parchment coat the seed is found to be covered
by a thin membranous seed coat, the so-called silver skin,
generally glistening and closely adherent to the green seed.

In English-speaking countries where coffee is produced,
the fruit is often spoken of as a "cherry," and if a very
tough and juiceless cherry had two large kernels or stones
instead of one, well flattened against each other and
parchment-like or horny in consistency instead of stony, it
would be very similar to a coffee drupe.

After maturity, the coffee seed retains its vitality for
about three months, and, if planted under suitable con-
ditions, germinates in three weeks to a month. Seedlings
grow rapidly, producing four or five pairs of leaves in
as many months, and the first pair of lateral branches
in eight to nine months.

A young Arabian coffee plant generally begins flowering
in its third year, producing its first small crop in the
fourth. Its maximum production is in most places reached
in its seventh to tenth year, perhaps usually in the eighth,
and it will continue to bear in somewhat diminishing ratio
from the tenth up to twenty or thirty and even to fifty
years and will sometimes live to be a hundred, though in
most of the places where it is planted it is actually very

10 Field Museum of Natural History

much shorter-lived. In Arabia, the coffee trees are said
to mature in five years and to require replacement within
twenty years from planting. In some central American
plantations where severe pruning of the trees is practised,
the number annually required for replacement is as high
as ten per cent. On the average plantation it is much less.
In Brazil it is said to be about 4 per hundred.

New plants are produced in various ways. The usual
practice in most places is to plant selected seed in seed
beds, transferring the seedlings, as soon as they have
developed one or two pairs of leaves, to a nursery where
they are set out, properly spaced, under some form of shade
until they reach a size convenient for a second transplant-
ing or final setting out when six to eight months old. In
Brazil a common practice is to plant the seeds directly
in the field where they are to remain, several seeds being
dropped in each hole to produce a clump with three or
four stems to grow up together.

The distance between plants varies from one and a
half or two to three or four meters, and the number of
plants per acre varies accordingly from 360 to 600 trees.
The unit of area used on coffee plantations is generally
the metric hectare, 1,000 square meters, equivalent to
2.35 acres. It is usually estimated that one workman
is needed to care for each hectare or for each 1,000 trees,
but many plantations manage with less.

The amount of pruning practised varies from almost
none, except removal of suckers and of dead branches, as
on Brazilian plantations, to the most severe and compli-
cated repression of the natural conical or pyramidal shape
of the tree, for the purpose of keeping down the height
and to provide better access of air and light to the bearing
portion of the plant. In some places the entire main
stem is cut back after a few years, and vertical shoots
from the lower part of the trunk allowed to form new
secondary stems. In the same places it is apt to be the
practice to cut back the normal taproot of the young

COFFEE PICKING IN LIBERIA
Copyright by Underwood & Underwood

'*«>*^

COFFEE GROWING UNDER SHADE IN COLOMBIA

Coffee U

plant on transferring it from the nursery to the plantation,
all apparently with the intention of adapting it better
to local conditions of soil and climate, and with the
expectation of increasing the yield.

Young coffee plants generally require some shade.
Commonly this is obtained by planting a rapid-growing
crop such as corn between the rows, but in most countries,
bananas or plantains are generally used for the purpose,
and serve admirably, except for exhausting the soil ten
times as fast as the coffee trees, furnishing the roots of the
coffee plants formidable competition for nutritive elements
in the ground. In Arabia, fig trees are said to be used
at times for shade. Niebuhr observed the use of the
Geiger tree which is indigenous there, but reliance is placed
rather on planting in shady valleys reached by the sun
for only a few hours daily. In the East Indies, Central
America, and northern South America, shade trees such
as Erythrina, Albizzia, Inga, and others, are almost
always employed to protect the coffee trees from the heat
of the noonday sun, from excessive winds, and from the
force of rain storms, but on the whole there is as much
variety of practice in the provision of shade as there is
in the extent and manner of pruning. Leguminous trees
of rapid growth with feathery foliage, an open spreading
crown, strong branches and deep roots are preferred.
In the ipain coffee region of eastern Brazil, lying between
22° and 24° S. lat., only the young plants are shaded
by some temporary cover or cover crop such as com
or mandioca between the rows, discontinued a^ soon
as the trees come into bearing, and no shade trees are used
— the explanation being that at the altitude at which
coffee is grown there, mostly between two and three
thousand feet, meteorological conditions, the proportion
of bright sunlight and overcast sky, the amount of wind
and rain (1315-1756 mm.) and its distribution, are such
that no artificial protection is needed, and the coffee trees
flourish under the open sky. There is noted in Brazil,

12 Field Museum of Natural History

however, a recent interest in the use of shade trees on
coffee plantations for their regulatory action conducive
to a more uniform ripening of the fruit.

Coffee in the New World is planted almost everywhere
on virgin land cleared by burning the forest. Generally
little attention is paid to the matter of fertilizing or pre-
paring the ground or to replacing the elements taken out
of it, nor always, unfortunately, to moderating by contour
treatment or otherwise, the leaching and erosion of the
soil which takes place when the natural cover of forest
trees and underbrush is removed and the humus of the
forest floor, accumulated during thousands of years, is
suddenly exposed to the free play of the elements.

In its native Abyssinia, the coffee tree is a plant of the
highlands and, wherever planted, Arabian coffee trees
usually thrive best at an altitude of 1,200 to 2,000 meters,
3,000 to 4,000 feet, above sea level, in situations where
freedom from frost may be found combined with an annual
mean temperature of 60° to 72° Fahrenheit (16°-22° C),
or, still better, approaching as closely as possible to 65°
Fahr. (18° C). In Mexico, where the northern limit is
lat. 22° and there is sometimes danger of a cold north
wind, it is the rule to plant only where the minimum
temperature never reaches 5° C. or within 10° Fahr. of
freezing. A prolonged wintry blast would destroy a coffee
plantation in a few hours. In the Sao Paulo coffee district
the temperature descends at times to 3° C, and in localities
at lower altitudes rarely to freezing.

Rainfall in coffee-growing countries varies from 30 to
120 inches. An annual precipitation of 40 to 70 inches
is considered most favorable, but the distribution of the
rainfall during the year, absence of heavy rains during
the flowering season, and good weather for the preparation
of the crop are of greater importance than its exact
quantity. Excess of moisture acts to stimulate vegetative
development instead of the production of fruit. The

Coffee 13

greater the precipitation the greater the importance of a
well-drained terrain.

At sea level Coffea arabica grows well and flowers, but
usually fruits so poorly that its cultivation is of slight if
any economic interest. In lowlands it is also greatly
subject to the chief fungus disease of the coffee tree known
as leaf spot, a rust, Hemileia, which has put an end to
coffee cultivation in various places where it has appeared,
e.g. in Ceylon, Bourbon, and the East Indies. In Mexico
it is said that the shrub at 500 feet will produce about one
pound per year, at 1,000 feet two pounds, at 2,000 three,
at 3,000 even more, but above 4,000 feet the production
decreases rapidly. If this is correct, it is easily under-
stood why below 2,000 feet little or none is planted.

Production varies considerably with the age of the
tree. The yield may thus vary in different parts of the
same plantation and may be twice as great on newly
cleared and planted portions as on the old. The average
production per tree of some American coffeegrowing
countries appears to be as follows: Colombia ^ lbs.
(340 grams), Costa Rica slightly more than % lbs. (350
grams), Guatemala 14 oz. (400 grams), Ecuador 103^ oz.
(300 grams). Compared with these figures, the average
Brazilian production of 1.5 kilograms or 3.3 pounds
appears to be high but probably represents correctly the
average for the principal Brazilian coffee region, where a
production per tree in especially favorable cases may
reach six and a half pounds per unit, and rarely as much
as ten or eleven. A Sao Paulo "tree," however, generally
consists of a clump of three or four stems planted together
as described above. On the basis of world production for
1931, when the total number of coffee trees existing was
estimated at three billions, one arrives at an average of
1}4 lbs. per tree or 600 grams, which may be accepted as
a general average per annum for Arabian coffee. Where,
as is often the case, there is a secondary crop following
the principal one, this smaller crop may be expected to

14 Field Museum of Natural History

yield about one-third as much as the principal one. In
some countries there is a third crop due to a third flowering
period or there may be, as in places in Central America,
an almost continuous production of fruit throughout
the year.

Coffeegrowers are likely to discuss production per 1,000
trees instead of average per tree or per hectare, alqueire,
acre, or other surface measure.

A statement which embodies the expectations of the
coffee planter in Brazil is to the effect that an estate of
80 hectares (125 acres) should produce 50 tons of coffee
beans per annum. This would be at least three times the
average production in a coffee-producing country such as
Mexico.

The character of the coffee produced in any region is
determined primarily by the inherent characteristics of
the particular variety cultivated, but soil, altitude, and
meteorological conditions, as well as cultivation, are im-
portant factors governing the size and nature of the
crop. In Mexico, according to Villares, coffee grown at
500 meters is thus worth three dollars less per hundred
pounds than coffee grown at 1,800 meters. But the quality
of the product is to a large extent dependent also on the
manner of gathering the crop and its preparation for the
market. The hand-picking of well matured fruit only,
i.e. dark or piu-plish, even somewhat past maturity to the
point of beginning to be wilted or shriveled, as practised
in the countries producing the best grades of mild coffee,
ensures a high-class product, while any admixture of
green fruit, so-called sunburnt, yellow, dried and spoiled
berries, even in very small proportion, is sufficient to
ruin the taste or flavor of a large quantity.

As all the fruit on the trees does not mature at once,
such hand-picking must be repeated many times and
wherever practised prolongs considerably the harvest. It
also requires more labor than allowing the ripened fruit
to fall to the ground and raking it together at intervals

Coffee 15

or stripping the branches of all ripe, near-ripe, and unripe
fruit left on the tree, as is often done e.g. in Brazil, where
the relatively short harvest season, the magnitude of the
crop, and the extent of many of the plantations makes
the slower and more laborious process impracticable.
However, even in Brazil, the large-scale harvesting of the
mature fruit only, is beginning to be practised with the
use of vibrators and cloths spread under the trees to catch
the crop.

Once they are mixed in gathering, mature and imma-
ture fruit cannot well be separated. Such separation as
is later obtained by the machine used for removing the
pulp from the beans, is at best very imperfect.

The next and most important operation on a coffee
plantation is the preparation of the crop for the market.
The quality of the final product depends to a very large
extent on the manner in which this is managed. There
are two distinct methods in use, which may be called the
dry method and the wet. The former is the older. It was
once general; it is the method used in Arabia and in
Abyssinia, and is still the prevailing one on small planta-
tions everywhere and in places where a scarcity of water
exists, as in parts of Brazil and in Mexico. The so-called
"native coffee" produced in English colonies is almost all
prepared by the dry or "poor man's method," which con-
sists in drying the entire coffee berries in the open. The
fruit as gathered from the trees is spread out on trays or
mats, where small quantities are dried, or on a large scale,
on the hard, clean, preferably paved, drying ground in
a thin layer which is constantly turned over to secure
evenness of drying. It is pushed into heaps and covered
to protect it from the heat of the midday sun, and from
rain, or, where smaller quantities are handled, on plat-
forms or trays which may be run under cover. The open-
air exposure is continued until all danger of fermentation
is past, after which further drying may proceed more
slowly in ventilated drying bins or barns. The hull or

16 Field Museum of Natural History

husk is later crushed and separated from the dried beans
by mechanical means. In many places this is still accom-
plished in the most primitive manner possible in a large
wooden mortar, but is usually effected by some form of
machine or mill. Small coffeegrowers lacking machinery
for this purpose, often sell their product dried in the hull
to the larger planters who are better equipped.

The wet process originated on British-owned planta-
tions. It produces so-called "washed coffee" and involves
the use of water from the beginning, first to separate the
dried and defective fruit and accidental debris from
the perfect coffee berries, and then as an aid to freeing
the latter from their pulp. Once gathered, the fruit should
be freed from its pulp as soon as possible, preferably within
some hours of its picking, or, if left till the following day,
may be kept cool in tanks of water to prevent fermentation.

The berries are conducted in water to a pulping
machine which frees the seeds or beans from the fleshy
covering of the fruit, leaving them enclosed only in their
parchment coat with at most some adhering shreds of
pulp and a slippery coating of saccharine and mucilaginous
matter. If allowed to remain during drying, this would
promptly start an alcoholic or acid fermentation, which
would penetrate the parchment and attack the cellulose
of the green and moist beans, thereby injuring the natural
color and aroma of the final product. The adhering
saccharine substance must therefore be removed as soon
as possible. To this end, the coffee from the depulping
machines is conducted into covered vats where a controlled
fermentation of 12 to 24 hours is allowed to take place
in order to destroy or loosen the remains of gummy and
sugary matter. This is then completely removed by
thorough washing in running water for six to twelve hours.

The cleaned coffee in parchment is then dried, much
as in the other method, at first on drying grounds or coffee
terraces, generally tile paved or cemented, and finally

Coffee 17

dried slowly and more perfectly in covered drying bins or
barns, so constructed that every part is reached by forced
or natural ventilation.

Natural drying in the open is commonly employed
where weather conditions at harvest time permit, as is
generally the case in Brazil. Spreading the washed coffee
as rapidly as possible in a thin layer in order to get rid
of surplus moisture, keeping it constantly stirred or turned
over for evenness in drying, using the warmth of the sun
of the early morning hour and of the late afternoon as
an aid to drying but not permitting any overheating
which would be destructive of the volatile oils on which
aroma depends, avoiding exposure to moisture of dew
or rain, with careful watching throughout the process of
drying so that it may be carried just far enough to remove
all danger of fermentation — such are the main points
observed in the preparation of a high-quality product.
The progress of the drying is judged by the color and hard-
ness of the green bean, which, soft in the beginning, be-
come corneous as it dries and fails to dent under pressure
applied by the fingernail. The beans are often tested also
by biting them and by cutting with a knife to examine
the progress of drying of the inside. As the beans dry,
the longitudinal groove on the flat side tends to close.

It is generally conceded that the drying of the coffee
in the open gives a product superior to that obtained by
artificial methods, but in localities where a sufficient
open-air exposure is not possible on account of frequent
rains, or because of lack of sufficient area of drying ground,
a combination of natural and artificial drying is often
employed. One or more days of exposure in the open are
then followed by several days of treatment in some form
of mechanical drier in which the coffee is kept in motion and
subjected to forced ventilation at a suitable temperature
until quite dry enough. In Colombia further importation
of such driers is forbidden as prejudicial to the quality
of the product.

18 Field Museum op Natural History

Certain countries, such as Java, ship coffee in parch-
ment, and buyers in some European ports prefer to receive
it thus, but usually the parchment is removed by a simple
mill and blower, and the inner thin pellicle or silver skin,
the seed coat proper, is removed by another operation
called polishing. At the same time or separately, the
dried coffee is subjected to a mechanical cleansing or
winnowing to remove sticks, broken beans, small particles
and dust, etc. By the use of a succession of sieves it is
then mechanically graded according to size of the beans
and, where the highest grade of product is desired, sub-
jected to a final elimination of defects by careful hand-
picking. Remaining foreign matter, such as small sticks
and stones, as well as husks and broken, discolored or
otherwise defective beans, are thus eliminated, before the
coffee is finally placed in bags. Throughout the whole
process of preparation there is a gradual reduction in
bulk. It is usually estimated that five or six pounds of
Arabian coffee berries give one pound of dried coffee beans.

The Spread of Coffee Cultivation
The coffee district of Arabia constitutes less than 2%
of the area of that sandy and mostly rainless peninsula.
It is only in the mountains and highlands of its southeast
corner that the monsoons in spring and early summer bring
sufficient precipitation to permit the maintenance of the
Arab's terraced coffee gardens. These are generally
located on some slope or in a valley of the few mountains
which rise above the general level of the highlands, in
situations where partial shade prevails and where it is
possible to obtain water for irrigation from the mountain
springs or brooks. The district extends from Aden to
Loheia, 13° to 16° N. latitude, the most important part
being Yemen al-a'la. Beit-el-Fakih, the coffee capital,
Hodeida, Sana, and Tais are other important points of
the coffee-producing area.

The production of the small Arabian coffee area was
never very great, and even when augmented by contribu-

HARVEST TIME ON A BRAZILIAN COFFEE PLANTATION

DRYING COFFEE ON A SMALL PLANTATION IN COLOMBIA

Coffee 19

tions from southern Abyssinia, would have been insufficient
for any widespread consumption beyond the eastern end
of the Mediterranean. From Arabia, however, coffee
cultivation soon spread to other parts of the world.

Coffee is said to have been carried to Ceylon in 1505
by a traveling Arab and to have been planted in Mysore,
India about 1600 by a returning pilgrim who brought
seven seeds. In spite of a strict prohibition after the
trade had begun to take on some importance, viable seeds
were carried to Ceylon (1690) and soon afterwards to
Malabar and to Batavia in Java. The first plants intro-
duced into Java were destroyed by a flood, but a second
attempt with plants from Malabar was successful and
laid the foundation for the coffee industry of the Dutch
East Indies, and incidentally, furnished the plants which,
by way of Amsterdam, became the ancestors of most of
the coffee trees in the New World. The first sample of
coffee grown near Batavia was sent to Holland in 1706.
The first commercial shipment of coffee, of 894 pounds,
was made five years later. Accompanying the former was
a branch of the coffee bush which was studied by the
botanist Commelin, and a single potted plant for the
botanic garden of Amsterdam which had the first green-
houses in Europe. Descendants of this plant were dis-
tributed to other botanic gardens of Western Europe,
and plants or seeds were later sent to the Dutch West
Indies and to the Dutch colony Surinam in South America.

The story of how, after the peace of Utrecht, a coffee
plant was sent to the king of France, has been retold so
many times that it seems best to quote an early version
as found in John Ellis, Historical Account of Coffee (1774),
pp. 16-17:

"The first account of this tree being brought into
Europe we have from Boerhaave, in his Index of the
Leyden Garden, part 2, page 217, which is as follows:
'Nicholas Witsen, burgomaster of Amsterdam, and
governor of the East India Company, by his letters often

20 Field Museum of Natural History

advised and desired Van Hoorn, governor of Batavia, to
procure from Mocha, in Arabia Felix, some berries of the
Coffee-tree, to be sown at Batavia; which he having
accordingly done, and by that means, about the year
1690, raised many plants from seeds, he sent one over
to governor Witsen, who immediately presented it to the
garden at Amsterdam, of which he was the founder and
supporter: it there bore fruit, which in a short time pro-
duced many young plants from the seeds.' Boerhaave
then concludes that the merit of introducing this rare
tree into Europe is due to the care and liberality of Witsen
alone.

"In the year 1714, the magistrates of Amsterdam, in

order to pay a particular compliment to Louis XIV,

King of France, presented to him an elegant plant of this

rare tree, carefully and judiciously packed up to go

by water, and defended from the weather by a curious

machine covered with glass. The plant was about five

feet high, and an inch in diameter in the stem, and was

in full foliage, with both green and ripe fruit. It was

viewed in the river, with great attention and curiosity,

by several members of the Academy of Sciences, and was

afterwards conducted to the Royal Garden at Marly,

under the care of Monsieur de Jussieu, the king's professor

of Botany; he had, the year before, written a Memoir,

printed in the History of the Academy of Sciences of Parish

in the year 1713, describing the characters of this genus,'

together with an elegant figure of it, taken from a smaller

plant, which he had received that year from Monsieur

Pancras, burgomaster of Amsterdam, and director of the

botanical garden there."

The Regent of France, the Due d'Orleans, and the
French Academy of Sciences took an active interest in
the introduction of economic plants into the French
colonies. The King brought trees of cinnamon, pepper,
and cloves to send to the West Indian Islands and (even
before 1700 ?) had sent coffee seeds to Haiti. In 1716,

Coffee 21

the Royal Academy of Sciences decided to send a represen-
tative to Martinique to cultivate useful plants and to
report on them, and selected for the purpose M. Isambert,
a physician, apothecary to his Royal Highness the Regent.
He sailed with bees, silkworms, and some plants among
which were three coifee trees, and he was given particular
instructions relative to their care, but unfortunately this
emissary of the French Academy died almost as soon as
he had arrived at his destination. Requests for a repeti-
tion of the attempt at introduction of coffee were opposed
by the FVench India Company.

Soon after its arrival in Amsterdam, coffee had been
sent to the island of Curasao and in 1714 was introduced
into the Dutch South American colony, Surinam or Dutch
Guiana, where it prospered. A Frenchman named Morgue
from Cayenne, said variously to be a prospector or a
runaway soldier, who had taken refuge in Surinam,
returned about 1719 to the French colony carrying,
perhaps by previous arrangement with the authorities in
Cayenne, coffee seeds which were planted in the garden
of the governor, M. de la Motte Aigron. These, with
further seeds obtained the following year by a detachment
of soldiers from Cayenne searching for prisoners across
the Surinam border, had by 1723 produced ten thousand
plants. In 1720, coffee was carried from Surinam to
Barbados by a Captain Young and probably was supplied
to French West Indian Islands from Cayenne.

Its introduction into Martinique, however, has
generally been credited to a French Naval Lieutenant,
De Clieu, long stationed in the West Indies, who had
gone to France in 1718 but had occasion to return to
Martinique. This officer has become a French legendary
hero through his account of sharing his scant ration of
drinking water with the coffee plant. The single plant
he carried, obtained from the royal garden in Paris five
years after the unfortunate mission of M. Isambert,
arrived safely in Martinique, and produced fruit in 1721,

22 Field Museum op Natural History

in time to furnish seed for a new and valuable cultivation
to take the place of the cacao (introduced 60 years earlier)
which had been destroyed by an earthquake or hurricane.
According to M. Chevalier, the only existing account of
this feat and all subsequent romantic versions of it were
based on letters written by De Clieu himself fifty years
later, one of them to the botanist Aublet, another to the
editor of a periodical, both of which were published.
From Martinique, coffee cultivation spread rapidly to
neighboring islands, first to Guadeloupe, where in 1777
there were 18 million coffee trees. Concerning its intro-
duction into Haiti and San Domingo, there are conflicting
statements. It was introduced into Jamaica in 1728 and
soon afterwards into the Spanish islands of Cuba (1748)
and Puerto Rico (1755). Before the end of the eighteenth
century the production in the French possessions in the
West Indies had grown to 50,000 tons, sufficient to supply
not only the mother country but also the larger part of
the entire European consumption of that time.

From French Guiana, five coffee plants and more than
a thousand fruits were carried to Para, in the Portuguese
colony of Brazil, in 1727, by a Brazilian officer, Palheta,
returning from a border mission to Ceyenne. Para, at
the mouth of the Amazon, does not offer especially favor-
able conditions for growing coffee, but its cultivation was
encouraged by the governor, and in 1732 seven pounds
of coffee were sent as a sample to Lisbon, the first Brazilian
shipment of coffee. In 1755 there were 17,000 coffee
trees in Para, and 967 bags of 160 lbs. each were shipped
to Portugal. Some forty years after its arrival in Para,
coffee reached Sao Luis, in the adjoining state of Maranhao.
From Sao Luis it was carried to Rio de Janeiro in 1774.
From there plants were distributed throughout eastern
Brazil where, especially in the highlands of Sao Paulo,
the Arabian coffee found soil and climatic conditions
apparently more favorable to its growth than those
existing in its homeland or encountered in any other part

Coffee 23

of the world where it has been introduced. The first
export shipment from the present Brazilian coffee district,
was made from Rio in 1800 and consisted of 13 bags.
From southeastern Brazil, coffee reached Paraguay, Chile,
and Peru.

Before the end of the eighteenth century, Spaniards
from the West Indies had carried coffee to Venezuela
(1740) and other countries of northern South America —
Colombia, Ecuador, and Bolivia — also to Central America,
perhaps first to Costa Rica and to Mexico (1790), whence
it spread (1850-52) to Guatemala. The coffee of Salvador
is said to have come from Cuba.

Africa, the original home of coffee, is the last continent
to enter upon its large-scale production for the world
market. Plantations have been developed in many places
in West as well as in East Africa, most recently in British
Kenya, but the total production of the continent is still
relatively small, as is that of the Asiatic mainland. The
Philippine Islands grow some coffee, as do Hawaii and
various Islands of Oceanica, but their total in percentages
of world production is small.

The Coffee Trade
world production and consumption

As an article of trade, coffee is said not to have been
greatly appreciated by the Arabs until the arrival of
European merchants. These were Portuguese (1500) who
had just circumnavigated Africa, Turkish traders from the
north (1530-40), and later ships of the British East India
Company (1610) and Dutch (1614) merchantmen stop-
ping on their way to or from the Indies. During the early
days of its introduction in Europe the Arabian crop
went north from Mocha by way of the Red Sea to Cairo
and Alexandria in Egypt and to Stamboul on the Bos-
phorus, as points of final distribution.

The first port in western Europe to engage in the coffee
trade, Marseilles (1660), obtained its supplies in Cairo

24 Field Museum of Natural History

and for some time enjoyed virtual monopoly of the supply
in the West until the merchants of St. Malo brought
coffee directly from Aden or Mocha by way of the long
seaward journey around Cape of Good Hope (1708-1713).
Soon afterwards the French India Company was formally
granted the sole right to supply coffee to France (1723).
With the shift to the maritime route, and for other reasons,
Mocha lost its importance as a coffee mart, its place being
taken by Hodeida and Aden. By 1800 the coffee-carrying
trade was handled largely by American clippers, the whole
export being then 16,000 bales of 305 pounds each, and
was laid down in Europe at a price with which the India
Company could not compete.

When the Dutch began to plant coffee in the East
Indian islands and the product was sent directly from
Java to Amsterdam, the situation altered. The available
supply was soon greatly increased and exclusive depend-
ence on the Arabian production came to an end. Three
million pounds were received in Holland in 1745. Coffee
had also been introduced in 1717 into the French islands
of He de France and Bourbon or Reunion off southeast
Africa, whence 360,000 pounds were exported in 1730.
From Bourbon it was later introduced into Madagascar.

When the French West Indies, particularly Martinique,
asked permission to send coffee to France, this was at
first refused as interfering with the India Company's
privilege, but on repeated representations it was after-
wards granted by the King on condition that the product
be received in French ports for sale only to other parts of
Europe. The French consumption at that time was six
to eight thousand tons, while the West India production
aggregated fifty thousand.

English plantations in Ceylon and in India soon made
of London also a coffee port, though less important than
the continental ones. The French plantations in Bourbon
were not a success, and with the loss of Haiti and other
difficulties in the West Indies, the production of the

Coffee 26

French colonies had dropped at the end of the 18th
century to 500 tons. The Napoleonic wars then interfered
with the European trade, the English blockade shutting
off coffee imports to the continent.

Coffeegrowing in the New World increased in the
meantime, especially in eastern Brazil, which, beginning
its export with a trifling quantity in 1800, became an
important factor from 1835 on, exporting a million bags
in 1850, 2 millions in 1860. With the great destruction
of plantations in Ceylon, Java, and Sumatra in the last
quarter of the past century by the fatal leaf-spot disease,
the greater part of the coffee trade passed definitely to
the Western Hemisphere. The United States had become
the greatest market for the product not only because of
its great increase in population but also owing to a rapidly
growing per capita consumption. In 1850 this was four
and a half pounds per person per year. It has since
crown to twelve pounds and is exceeded now only by the
per capita consumption of the Scandinavian countries,
Denmark with 173^ pounds and Sweden, with 17 pounds
per capita per annum, holding the primacy in this respect.

Imports to the United States were about 5^ million
bags or 748 million pounds in 1900. In 1930 these had
risen to 12 million bags or 1,570 millions pounds, in 1935
to over 13 million bags, one-half of the world consumption.
France is the second largest consumer with 3 million bags,
Germany third with 2 to 23/^.

In 1900 the world's production and consumption of
10 million bags practically balanced. Since then there
has been a steady growth in consumption (23,900,000
bags in 1931-32) accompanied by an extraordinary and
speculative striving for the largest possible production
(37,500,000 bags in 1931-32, 39,700,000 bags in 1933-34).
Continuous expansion of the coffeegrowing area has re-
sulted in the existence of 4 billion coffee trees in the
world, of which 2,967 million in Brazil, half of them in
Sao Paulo with some nine million acres of coffee planta-

26 Field Museum of Natural History

tions, and the production of a huge unsaleable surplus.
While the world production of coffee has doubled in the
last 20 years, that of Brazil has tripled. In its effort to
avoid the unfavorable effect of this on the market price,
Brazil since 1931 has destroyed by burning 60,000,000
bags of coffee. Its exports in 1936 were 14,180,000 bags
of 132 lbs. each, or 1,701,600,000 lbs. out of a total world
consumption of 3,100,000,000 lbs. The Brazilian surplus
at the end of 1937 is said to be 17,500,000 bags.

The second largest producer of coffee is Colombia with
4,000,000 bags in 1937, one-fifth as much as Brazil. The
Dutch East Indies with 1,650,000 bags are third in rank;
Salvador, Venezuela, Guatemala, Mexico, Haiti, and Costa
Rica, fourth to ninth.

When 15,000,000 bags of coffee were produced in a
year practically all was consumed. Of the 38,000,000 bags
produced in 1936, 24,000,000 were consumed. The unused
surplus was greater than the whole annual production of
twenty years before.

Other Species of Coffee

In the preceeding pages, coffee has been treated as if
it were the product of a single species, viz. Arabian coffee
(Coffea arabica L.), which is practically the only species
grown commercially in the New World, producing more
than 90 per cent of the world's coffee crop. But since
coffee became a commodity of world-wide interest, botani-
cal exploration in Africa has brought to light the existence
of numerous other species of the genus Coffea. About one-
half of these, or eighteen, grow spontaneously in tropical
West Africa, while of the rest, three grow wild in southeast
Africa and three are native in the islands of Madagascar,
Bourbon, Mauritius, etc., off the southeast African coast.
A few species of the genus Coffea have been found in
southern India, Java, Sumatra, and one in New Guinea,
but most of these belong to a section of the genus which
does not furnish coffee for beverage purposes. Some of

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Coffee 27

these species of Coffea are very handsome plants when
in flower. Many of the African species have been tried
with some success for coffee production, and a few of them
are being grown commercially in situations and under
conditions unsuitable for Arabian coffee, in Africa, in
India, and in the East Indian Islands.

The best known of all competitors of the Arabian
coffee plant is the Liberian coffee, C. liherica, a lowland
plant, larger and more robust than C. arahica, with large
leaves and flowers and bearing larger fruit. Contrary
to early optimistic expectations entertained for this species,
it has been found to be subject to leaf-spot disease and
yields a product which is not greatly esteemed. A coffee
tree of Belgian Congo {Coffea canephora var. Laurentiana)
known by the horticultural name Coffea robusta, has been
widely planted in Java to replace the Liberian coffee
once grown there but abandoned. Robusta coffee is
esteemed for its rapid growth and its precocious and high
yield, but furnishes only an inferior grade of coffee. It
is planted, however, in sufficient quantity to constitute
six per cent of the world's production. Most of its pro-
duct is sold by the Dutch to those European countries
where coffee is habitually mixed with substitutes, especially
chicory, and where quality is therefore not demanded,
but a part of it finds its way to the United States, where
it is purchased as a so-called price coffee and used by some
American coffee roasters as "fillers" in their blends. The
Dutch islands Java and Sumatra thus furnish a small
quantity of the highest-grade coffee from Arabian trees
grown in the mountains, about 10% of their production,
and a large quantity of some of the poorest or robusta
coffee, known also as Palembang, grown at lower altitudes.

A species from Ubangi, a tributary of the Congo,
"Chari" coffee (Coffea excelsa), so named from the Chari
River, is the largest of all coffee trees, growing commonly
twenty to forty feet, and even to sixty feet high. It is
of some interest in the Old World tropics, Indo-China,

28 Field Museum of Natural History

etc., for its adaptability to a variety of conditions not
suitable to C. arahica and yields a product said to be
superior to C. liberica and rohusta.

A variety of Coffea arahica found in Grand Comoro
Island is entirely devoid of caffeine. A species from the
Mascarene island of Reunion or Bourbon and from
Madagascar has only a trace of caffeine, but also poisonous
properties. Another species of Madagascar is too bitter
to be used.

The systematic relationship and genetics of the many
species and varieties of coffee* still await more thorough
investigation which may prove to be of great practical
importance to the coffee industry in general. The Dutch
agricultural stations in Java have been active in this
direction. At present there is no general agreement
about the relative merits of the more recently discovered
and less cultivated species of coffee, but they are a matter
of great interest to colonial governments in Africa, Asia,
and the East Indies, where conditions for growing Arabian
coffee are not favorable and a satisfactory substitute
would therefore be welcomed which would permit competi-
tion on somewhat more equal terms with the coffeegrowing
countries of the New World.

Composition of the Coffee Bean— Caffeine

Coffee Roasting

The main stimulative constituent of coffee is the
alkaloid caffeine, first found by the chemist Runge who
extracted it from coffee beans in 1820, about the time
alkaloids were first discovered in plants. Caffeine has
since been found to exist in all parts of the coffee plant,
especially in the leaves. The significance of the presence
of such substances and their place in the economy of the
plants in which they are found are not well understood.
Their chemical composition and physiological action is
much better known. Caffeine is thus described chemically
as a purine base, tri-methyl-xanthin, d, HNO4 O2 (CH3)3

Coffee 29

and may be synthetized. Isolated in its pure state it forms
masses of silky, needle-like, white crystals. Its physio-
logical action in small doses, such as are found in a few cups
of coffee of ordinary strength, is that of a stimulant,
producing a feeling of physical well-being, increasing
mental activity by its action on the central nervous system,
relieving fatigue and promoting muscular activity includ-
ing that of the heart and of the alimentary tract. It is
eliminated through the kidneys after some hours and
increases their function.

The fact that its stimulating action is not followed by
depressing after effect, as is the case with practically all
other stimulants, is very important, and has contributed
to the widespread use of coffee as a beverage, though the
pleasant and distinctive aroma is unquestionably also a
factor contributing to its popularity.

Caffeine is now known to exist in many other plants
besides coffee. The alkaloid called "theine," discovered
in the leaves of the tea bush, is identical with caffeine.
Tea dust, from which it may be extracted much more
economically than from coffee, is in fact the commercial
source of most of the caffeine used for medicinal purposes.
Cola nuts, the seeds of Guarana, and the leaves of Mat6
and of various other species of the Holly family are also
used for beverages that owe their stimulating properties
to their caffeine content. The principal alkaloid of cacao,
theobromine, is very similar to caffeine, which is also a
constituent of cacao.

Caffeine content varies considerably in the different
species and varieties of coffee from none at all in one
noncommercial species to as much as three per cent by
weight. In the varieties of Arabian coffee commonly
used, it varies from one-half to two and a half per cent,
the highest caffeine content being ascribed to coffee from
Colombia, the lowest to that from Mexico. Brazilian
and Guatemalan coffees are intermediate with three-
quarters to one and a third per cent. The average caffeine

30 Field Museum of Natural History

content of coffee beans is often stated to be one and a
half per cent.

A comparison of coffee and tea is frequently attempted
on the basis of their respective caffeine content, usually
expressed in percentages of dry weight. On this basis,
the caffeine content of tea is found to exceed greatly that
of coffee. The comparison ordinarily intended is that
of the caffeine content of the beverage, for which a much
smaller quantity of the dry weight is required of tea than
of coffee, equalizing the difference. A cup of either coffee
or tea as ordinarily prepared is thus found to contain about
the same quantity of caffeine, about one and a half grains.
Both have in addition other important constituents and
aromatic substances, especially the volatile oil on which
fragrance or aroma depends.

In coffee, the aroma is developed by the process of
roasting, which also serves to break down the cellulose
walls of the cells of the bean, facilitating the grinding or
pulverization necessary for the liberation of the soluble
substances and other ingredients contained in the bean.
The amount of these extracted from the ground coffee
in the process of preparation of the beverage may be
judged by the difference in weight of coffee used, and
weight of coffee grounds dried after making, which is
found to be about 25 per cent.

The roasting of coffee is said to have originated in
Persia. In many places, especially in coffeegrowing coun-
tries, the roasting of the required quantity of coffee beans
over a charcoal or other slow fire is still an indispensable
preliminary and part of each preparation of the beverage.
In other places where less importance is attached to
coffee-making, sufficient coffee is roasted at one time to
last for several days, enough being crushed or pounded
afterwards in a mortar, or ground, to serve as desired for
each occasion.

In the United States, however, and wherever the
convenience of package goods and trade-marked blends

Coffee 31

have become the order of the day, coffee is roasted in
quantity.

The roasting is begun at full heat, checked toward
the end of the roast, with the coffee kept in constant
motion in revolving drums or otherwise. The humidity
which is given off and the gases developed in the roasting
process are allowed to escape or are removed by forced
ventilation until the operation is completed. The roasted
beans should then have a uniform brown color and a
characteristic pleasant flavor. If the heat is not even, or
is too high, during any part of the roasting, the result is
a charring and blackening of the beans with a loss of the
aromatic essential oil and development of an unpleasant
odor and taste.

Ordinary grades of badly prepared coffee beans present
a speckled and variegated appearance after roasting, with
some beans shriveled and black; others, the imperfectly
mature ones, lighter in color than the rest, conspicuously
yellow to light brown, A mixture of large and small beans
also roasts unevenly, the small kernels becoming roasted
first.

Sometimes, as in Mexico, sugar is added during the
roasting in the belief that it will facilitate the formation
of flavor and retain the aroma. Owing to the increased
amount of heating required to caramelize the added sugar,
the result is usually the contrary of what is expected.

To stop the changes taking place in the heated beans,
the roasted coffee is spread out at once to cool. It is
found to have lost in the process about 12% to 18% of
its weight and to have increased about one-third in volume.

Unroasted coffee may be kept for many years and
improved in quality with a certain amount of ageing,
though to this there are said to be exceptions, the question
being one of slow chemical changes, favorable or unfavor-
able to flavor, which may take place in the bean. Roasted
coffee, on the other hand, deteriorates with rapidity.
The loss of aroma which takes place in a short time in

32 Field Museum of Natural History

roasted coffee is due to the combination of some of its
constituents with the oxygen of the air. There is enough
of this in the ordinary coffee can to cause a decided loss
of aroma, less in vacuum-packed cans in proportions to
the perfection of the removal of the air at the time of
packing. The staleness, which appears even before the
aroma has completely disappeared, has been attributed,
perhaps incorrectly, to changes producing rancidity of
the fixed oils in the coffee bean, which are not completely
destroyed in the process of roasting.

The composition of the green coffee is given roughly
as cellulose 34%, oils and fats 10 to 13%, sugar 7%,
protein 14%, water residual after drying 12%, plus various
other substances in smaller quantity.

The exact nature of the chemical changes which take
place in the roasting of the beans is a matter of somewhat
complicated organic chemistry. Sugar and starches are
caramelized and produce various new compounds. The
volatile oily substance called caffeol, considered the chief
factor in the aroma, is thought to be produced when
caffeine, sucrose, and caffetannic acid are heated together.
Caffetannic acid, however, is held to be a problematical
substance or at least a misnomer, and no tannin or tannic
acid is present in the roasted bean. The fixed oils are
mostly olein, also palmitin and stearin, and there are
present besides, various free fatty acids, and substances
such as furfural, pyrol, etc. Carbon dioxide and, to a
less extent, monoxide gas is evolved. A certain amount
of carbon dioxide is retained or is residual in roasted coffee
and in a vacuum pack replaces the exhausted air. Since
the discovery of caffeine, more than a hundred years ago, a
large amount of chemical research has been done on coffee,
but the chemical changes which take place in roasting are
still imperfectly understood. One investigator sums up
the present status of this subject by saying that there is no
doubt that compounds other than those isolated to date
are necessary to produce the aroma.

Coffee 33

Commercial Classification of Coffee

The many kinds of coffee sold in the coffee markets
of the world are generally distinguished first of all accord-
ing to their geographical origin, e.g. Brazilian coffee,
Java Coffee, Costa Rican Coffee, etc., and in the case of
the larger producing countries also more specifically by
the name of the port from which they are shipped, or of
the district, or sometimes of the trading center from which
they are derived.

Coffee from the Brazilian state of Sao Paulo is thus
generally known as Santos Coffee, Santos being the port
from which its exportation takes place. Coffee from the
district which finds its commercial outlet through the port
of Rio de Janeiro is called Rio Coffee, whether grown in
the State of Rio de Janeiro, in Minas Geraes, or in southern
Espirito Santo, though Minas coffee may also come on
the market as such. Victoria Coffee, mostly from the
Brazilian state of Espirito Santo, is exported through
the port of Victoria. Bahia, Pernambuco, Paranagua,
and Angra dos Reis are other Brazilian coffee ports of
less importance.

Venezuelan coffee is shipped from Maracaibo, from
Caracas, or rather from its port town. La Guaira, and from
Puerto Cabello. A certain amount of eastern Colombian
coffee finds its outlet through the first-named port.
Colombian coffees are generally known by the name of
the districts in which they are produced as Medellin,
Armenia, Manizales, Bogota, Bucaramanga, etc., shipped
from Atlantic and Pacific ports of Colombia. The Mexican
coffees best known in the United States are shipped mostly
from Veracruz, viz. Coatepec, Huatusco, Cordoba, Orizaba,
etc., produced in the state of Veracruz; Oaxaca, in the
state of that name, and Tapachula, in Chiapas.

On the other hand, where not distinctly forbidden as
in the United States, coffee grown in Sumatra or other
East Indian islands is often designated as Java, the latter

34 Field Museum of Natural History

being famous as a coffeegrowing country and still enjoying
a high reputation for a part of its product. Only a very
small part of the coffee called Mocha in the world trade
is actually derived from Arabia or from Abyssinia, the
rest of so-called Mocha consisting of mocha type, small
rounded, preferably gray-green beans from almost any
place, e.g. Tepic, Mexico. In Brazil peaberry coffee, so-
called caracol or caracolillo of Spanish- American countries,
a rounded bean formed where only one seed of the fruit
develops, is known as mocha, moka or mokinha. Little
if any Bourbon coffee now comes from the island of that
name, where, early introduced from Mocha, it once
flourished for some time. Most of the Bourbon is prob-
ably grown in Sao Paulo, Brazil, especially in the district
of Riberao Preto, and is thus Bourbon Santos, and,
whether originally brought from the island of Bourbon
or not, in the course of long replanting in Brazil has
become a well established variety by that name. Marago-
gipe, also a Brazilian coffee, is a large-seeded variety
originating as a mutant in a place by that name in the
state of Bahia. It is now grown in various other countries,
especially in Mexico.

It is thus seen that a name of a geographical locality
known or famous for a certain quality or kind of product
is apt to be used by extension to indicate characteristics
or type of product rather than origins, quite apart from
intentional misbranding. The words Java and Mocha
have thus been used freely to designate certain kinds of
coffee ever since the beginning of the European coffee
trade. Misuse of such geographical designations for coffee
is now prohibited in the United States by regulations of
the Federal Food and Drug Inspection. Java may be
applied only to the product of Coffea arahica or liberica
actually grown in that island. Robusta coffee from Java
must be labeled "Java robusta" and is now denied consular
invoice if reshipped from Europe as e.g. Rio. Mocha must
be produced in the district of Yemen, Arabia.

A SAO PAULO COFFEE PLANTATION WITH ITS EXTENSIVE DRYING GROUND

Photo from Coffee Institute of SSo Paulo

Copyright by Theo. Preising

i-

WASHING COFFEE ON A BRAZILIAN PLANTATION

Coffee 35

In coffee from the Dutch Indies and from EngHsh
possessions in India and Africa, a distinction is made
between plantation coffee and native coffee, the latter
the product of small growers, the difference being usually
of the method of preparation, wet or dry, represented also
by the term washed and unwashed coffee.

According to the number of defects present, whether
in the form of broken beans, shells, unripe or scorched or
blackened beans, fragments of sticks or small stones,
coffee is graded into eight numbered types, number one
representing perfection, perhaps never attained, eight the
lowest type permissible on the New York Coffee Market.
Prices of Santos coffee are quoted for No. 4, of Rio for No.
7, of Colombian coffees for Manizales, prices of other grades
being in definite and constant proportion.

As to beverage making qualities the coffees most
generally used are divided into three main groups, mild,
soft, and hard. The term "mild coffees," or milds, is
generally applied to coffees grown in Colombia, Venezuela
and all the Central American countries, when the produc-
tion is almost entirely of "washed" coffee. It is also
applied to Mocha as well as to the small amount of high
class coffee of Java and Sumatra. The term is sometimes
used as a synonym for "washed" coffees, though it in-
cludes Mocha which is always prepared by the dry
method, and is applied to all coffee from the Colombia-
Central American region whatever their manner of prepa-
ration. These coffees are recognized as having no hard
or harsh flavor, but in spite of the designation "milds"
have a heavier "body" than Brazilian coffees, so that a
relatively small proportion of them can be used in mixtures
to impart this character to a beverage made of lighter
bodied coffee, such as Santos. Santos coffee is described
as "soft" or, when carefully prepared, "strictly soft."
This term is used, rather than "mild," to distinguish
Santos from Rio coffees which latter are apt to have a harsh
or acrid taste and are therefore spoken of as "hard." This

36 Field Museum of Natural History

character, in the opinion of Brazilian coffee experts, is
probably owing less to conditions of soil, climate, or alti-
tude at which grown than to prevailing methods of har-
vesting a mixture of ripe, unripe, and spoiled fruit and
a traditional lack of care in drying, preparation and sub-
sequent handling, conditions which the Brazilian coffee
growers are actively endeavoring to improve. Coffees
made from fully ripe fruit only, are devoid of the harshness
characterizing the hard, and yield a beverage of a finer
aroma. The milds of Colombia, Venezuela, and Central
America and the "strictly softs" of Brazil are readily
absorbed by the coffee trade, as are the high class coffees
of Netherlands Indies, and the Arabian Mocha. The latter
goes mostly to Levantine countries.

Coffee Substitutes and Adulterants

The European travelers who first penetrated beyond
the sources of the Nile found the natives making use of
the coffee fruit, boiled, mixed with fat and made into balls,
which, constituting both food and stimulant, were carried
as provisions on their expeditions. The use of roasted
beans for the preparation of a beverage was not observed,
but leaves of the coffee bush were used as tea in Ethiopia,
and in Abyssinia a drink called kisher was prepared from
the dried and toasted pulp of the coffee berry. This is
the so-called Sultan or Sultana coffee, widely used in
Yemen. It is described as of a golden yellow color and of
an agreeable, somewhat sweet flavor. Various travelers
aver that in the Arabian coffeegrowing district this infusion
is commonly employed for local consumption in preference
to the beverage made from the bean.

In Arabia and in all the Levantine countries, the
roasted coffee beans are pulverized and the grounds are
consumed with the liquid. Anise-seed, cardamom, cloves,
or other spice may be added for flavor. The addition of
sugar to coffee is thought to have originated in Alexandria
where the sugar cane was cultivated, or is ascribed to

Coffee 37

Constantinople. Milk or cream in coffee was apparently
first advocated in France, where coffee was recommended
to be made with hot milk instead of water.

As the use of coffee became popular in Europe, where
its price long remained high, attempts were made by
consumers to find a cheaper substitute in part or whole,
and by venders to find an adulterant which would pass
unperceived. Chemists were even ordered by the Prussian
government to find a substitute. Almost everything that
could be dried, roasted, and ground to look like coffee
has been tried.

The most popular of all adulterants is chicory, prepared
from the dried root of a European wild plant of the daisy
family. The use of this is said to have originated (1790)
in Batavia in Holland, and during the Napoleonic wars,
when coffee increased excessively in price and with the
English blockade of the ports became almost unobtainable,
the cultivation of chicory as a field crop became extensive
in Central Europe. It has been commonly employed ever
since and is now widely grown especially in Belgium,
Germany, and northern France.

Alleged harmful properties of coffee have furnished
the excuse for many enterprising attempts to produce a
preparation which would give a coffee-like beverage with-
out the use of coffee beans. Roasted cereals of all kinds,
bran, malt, special doughs, potatoes, carrots, beans,
particularly soy beans, peanuts, peas and other legume
seeds, especially of Lupin, Cassia, and St. John's bread,
sunflower seed, cotton seed, acorns, chestnuts, horse
chestnuts, black figs and prune pits, usually with chicory
and with molasses or some form of caramelized sugar —
mostly the same substances that have been employed as
adulterants, of which Field Museum has an extensive
collection — furnish the ingredients of many varieties of
so-called "health coffee."

To satisfy those who for some reason seek a coffee-
like drink without the caffeine content, industrial methods

38 Field Museum of Natural History

have also been devised for removing the caffeine from
coffee beans.

An unusual coffee substitute, employed in the drought
area of Brazil, consists of the seeds of the Carnauba or
wax palm. As material for a beverage, these are probably
about equal in value to dried olive pits, but are resorted
to locally in times of great want in places remote from
coffee-producing areas.

The demand for a satisfying warm beverage which
will serve to promote a feeling of physical comfort, appears
to be so well supplied by coffee that when this cannot be
obtained those accustomed to its use are impelled to seek
a substitute, however poor.

With the world's coffee production greatly in excess of
the demand and steadily increasing, with a decrease in
price, the incentive to adulteration or need for substitution
is rapidly diminishing. In the United States the enforce-
ment of pure food laws insures effectively against mis-
branding and fraudulent substitution.

An extensive discussion of methods of coffee-making,
including reports and opinions from competent experi-
menters who have made special study of the subject,
may be found in the chapter entitled "Preparing the
Beverage" in Uker's, All about Coffee.

The conclusions there found may be condensed from
a summary by Dr. Prescott of Massachusetts Institute
of Technology as follows: The best results will be obtained
with freshly roasted coffee, finely ground but not pul-
verized, infused at temperatures 185° to 195° F. (85° C-
90° C.) for not over two minutes in a glass, porcelain, or
vitrified container, and the liquid immediately filtered
from the grounds. The reason for avoiding the use of
metallic containers is that coffee infusion reacts with
metal, and tin plate, aluminum, copper, and nickel all
effect the taste. Boiling or prolonged contact with the
grounds increases the bitterness of the beverage, and

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SEPARATING DEFECTIVE BEANS BY HAND IN COLOMBIA

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Coffee 39

boiling coffee serves to perfume the house by diffusing the
aroma which should be reserved for the cup.

The Literature of Coffee

The first mention of coffee in European literature is
by the German physician Rauwolf, who had visited Syria
and on his return published (1573) an account of his
travels, describing a drink which he had seen in Aleppo,
made from the fruit hunna. The following year the
Dutch botanist, Clusius, described some coffee beans re-
ceived from a colleague in Ferrara. The earliest descrip-
tion of the plant is that of the Venetian physician. Prosper
Alpino, who had visited Egypt and published (1592) a
volume on the plants he had found there. His description
of a coffee bush from Arabia Felix is accompanied by a
poor drawing. The first correct delineation of a coffee
branch is that accompanying Jussieu's description (1713)
of the plant sent to Paris from Amsterdam.

The Arabic manuscript by the Sheikh Abd-al-Kader
or Ghaffer, preserved in the royal library at Paris, has
been translated in part and abstracted in French by
A. Galland, De I'origine et du Pr ogres du cafe sur un manu-
scrit arabe etc., Caen, 1699, and in German by Sontheimer
in Wissenschaftliche Annalen der gesamten Heilkunde,
Berlin, 1834.

The principal accounts of early visits by European
travelers to the Arabian coffee district are those of Jean
de la Roque and of Karsten Niebuhr.

La Roque's Voyage to Arabia Felix is an account of
the expedition sent by the merchants of Saint-Malo
(1709-12) to bring coffee directly from Mocha and in-
cludes two chapters by Grelaudiere on the coffee tree
and its fruit. Niebuhr's Travels and Description of Arabia
contains the observations made by a scientific expedition
sent by the King of Denmark in 1762. The group of
five men of which it was composed, headed by the botanist
Forskal with Cramer as surgeon and zoologist and Niebuhr,

40 Field Museum of Natural History

an army officer, as geographer and surveyor, was soon
reduced by death to three, viz. Niebuhr, an artist, and
a servant — finally to Niebuhr alone, who remained to set
down and returned to publish his own accurate and
excellent observations in addition to the notes left by
his companions, Hogarth's, The Penetration of Arabia
(1904), Wyman Bury, Arabia Infelix (1915), and that
remarkable book of travels among the Arabs, Doughty's
Arabia Secreta, all devote at least some pages or para-
graphs to an account of coffee in the land of Mahomed.

The bibliography of coffee is voluminous. Outstand-
ing recent works are Cheney (R. H.), A Mo7iograph of
the Economic Species of the Genus Coffee, New York, 1905,
and Ukers (Wm. H.), All About Coffee, New York, 1935,
the former mostly botanical and technical, with taxonomic
bibliography; the latter an encyclopedic account by the
editor of The Tea and Coffee Journal, of coffee in all its
aspects, with extensive bibliography.

The most recent scientific monograph on coffee is by
a French authority, Aug. Chevalier, Les Cafeiers du Globe,
of which the first part only has been published. A recent
German treatise on coffee and its cultivation, with an
extensive list of the animal and vegetable parasites and
pests of the coffee tree, is by A. Sprecher von Bernegg in
Tropische und Subtropische Weltwirtschaftspflanzen, Stutt-
gart, 1934.

The most comprehensive account of conditions and
methods of production in all principal coffeegrowing
countries of the world, is by George Dumont Villares,
0 CafS, a report to the government of the State of Sao
Paulo, Brazil, 1925.

Coffee, The Epic of a commodity, the Viking Press,
New York, 1935, is a journalistic account, originally
written in German by H. F. Jacob, of the history of
coffee, its introduction in Europe, with special reference
to the relation of coffee drinking to manners and social
customs.

Coffee 41

WORLD'S COFFEE PRODUCTION 1936 (lbs.)
(Intemat. Inst, Agric.)

Brazil 2,871,310,000

Colombia 492,735,000

Salvador 143,301,000

Venezuela 157,852,000

Guatemala 147,710,000

Mexico 99,208,000

Haiti 77,162,000

Cuba 50,706,000

Dominican Republic 42,990,000

Costa Rica 52,911,000

Nicaragua 35,274,000

Puerto Rico 19,842,000

Various others 119,051,000

Total 4,310,052,000

Netherlands Indies 235,895,000

India 33,069,000

Ethiopia 44,093,000

Tanganyika 29,983,000

Kenya 33,069,000

Angola 39,683,000

Madagascar 48,502,000

Belgian Congo 40,786,000

Various others 49,306,000

Total 554,386,000

Total of both groups 4,874,438,000

42 Field Museum of Natural History

COFFEE IMPORTS IN 1936
PRINCIPAL CONSUMING COUNTRIES (lbs.)
(Intemat. Inst. Agric.)

United States 1,730,194,000

France 411,163,000

Germany 342,379,000

Belgium 114,200,000

Sweden 102,074,000

Italy 69,887,000

Netherlands 68,344,000

Denmark 59,745,000

Argentina 50,706,000

Spain 48,702,000

Finland 48,281,000

Canada 39,683,000

Norway 35,715,000

Algeria 34,172,000

Switzerland 33,290,000

Great Britain and Northern Ireland 31,967,000

Union of South Africa 31,526,000

Czechoslovakia 24,912,000

Yugoslavia 15,212,000

Poland 13,889,000

Portugal 13,448,000

Japan 12,566,000

Austria 11,464,000

Total 3,343,319,000

Coffee 43

IMPORTATION OF COFFEE INTO U.S.A., 1936 (bags)
(U. S. Department of Commerce)

Brazil 7,842,926

Colombia 2,620,271

Venezuela 459,437

Ecuador 70,639

Peru 411

Chile 100

Argentina 1,556

Surinam 34,882

From South America 11,030,222

Salvador 436,097

Guatemala 418,451

Costa Rica 59,767

Nicaragua 56,733

Panama 7,055

Mexico 445,341

Honduras 4,491

From Central America and Mexico 1,427,935

Cuba 12,331

Haiti 33,130

Domin. Repub 50,789

Jamaica 7,695

B. W. 1 197

Dutch W. 1 326

From West Indies 104,468

Arabia 28,782

Ethiopia 10,535

B. Ea. Afr 164,242

Fr. Afr. Poss 8,538

Port. Afr. Poss 1,446

Liberia 19

From Africa and Arabia 213,562

Dutch Ea. Ind 222,909

Malay States 678

From East Indies 223,587

Canada 1,786

France 3,538

Germany. 1,296

Holland 8,181

U. Kingdom 50,005

Portugal 111,865

From non-producing countries 176,671

Total .13,176,445

THE LIBRARY OF THE

JUN201938

UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS

In Field Museum, cofifee and other caffeine yielding beverage
sources, tea, cacao, mate, cola guarand, etc., are included in the
exhibit of Food Plants in Hall 25, Department of Botany.

'.*- *

*' ..

LOADING COFFEE AT SANTOS