Cabana Restourant

Coffee lovers often take their daily fix for granted. You may know you love the taste of this great beverage, but how much do you really know about the stuff?

Ever wonder where all the different types come from? Wonder why it is sometimes called java? Heck – where does it come from anyway?

References to coffee drinking in America date back to 1668 and not surprising there was a spread of the coffee-houses thereafter. The coffee-house has played a significant role in American history. In fact, The Boston Tea Party was planned in a coffee-house. I have long thought that the popularity of coffee over tea in America was part of a larger cultural rejection of British culture that goes back to the Tea party of 1773, but I haven’t seen anything to prove this.

Globally, its origins go back even further in time. Thought to originate in the Horn of Africa way back in the 12th Century, it is said that the fruit of the plant was called “coffee-cherries.” Arabs of the time attempted to impose a ban on the export of coffee plants, but the clever Dutch found their way around this ban in 1616 and managed to cultivate some plants in greenhouses in the Netherlands.

By the late 1600s, the Dutch were expanding and colonizing around the world and they spread the cultivation of this great plant as they went. It’s the Dutch who are responsible for coffee growth in both India and Java (now Indonesia). The British brought it to Jamaica, where some of the most expensive brands in the world originate.

We can thank the Dutch for spreading coffee around the world because they became the great supplier of coffee internationally. Today, coffee is second only to oil as a global traded commodity and is responsible for as much as 50% of the foreign exchange income of some developing countries.

Although coffee is grown around the world, its unique flavor for each region comes from their soil and growing conditions.