Coffee History / 1800-1850

1800-1820

1813 – Francisco de Paula y Marin begins to cultivate some coffee on the island of Oahu in Hawaii. Marin was a physician and adviser to Hawaii’s King Kamehameha I. This is the first known coffee in Hawaii.

1818 – A metal-smith in Paris whose name is Laurens invents the first coffee percolator.

1820-1830

1822 – The beginning of espresso machines takes place in France where a prototype of a machine is made by Louis Bernard Babaut. The innovative brewing machine utilizes steam to force hot water through the coffee grounds in a special filter. This may have been the very first espresso!

Edward Loysel de Santais commercializes the machine in 1843 and displays it at the Paris Exposition of 1855 showing its ability to make up to 1,000 cups of coffee each hour. The only problem with the machine is that it can blow up or create very bitter coffee due to overheating or misuse.

1822 – Brazilian independence leads to massive coffee cultivation including the clearing of huge areas of rainforest for massive coffee plantations in Rio and then Sao Paulo. Brazil relies largely on African slave labor to work the plantations until slavery was abolished in 1888.

1825 – Coffee plants from Brazil are planted on the Hawaiian Island of Oahu by John Wilkinson, an English agriculturalist. He plants them on the estate of the island’s Governor named Boki, who served under King Kamehameha II.

“Liqeurs were not lacking; but the coffee especially deserves mention. It was as clear as crystal, aromatic and wonderfully hot; but, above all, it was not handed around in those wretched vessels called cups on the left banks of the Seine, but in beautiful and capacious bowls, into which the thick lips of the reverend fathers plunged, engulfing the refreshing beverage with a noise that would have done honor to sperm whales before a storm.”

Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, The Physiology of Taste, 1825

1828 – The first Kona Coffee is cultivated when American missionary Samuel Ruggles brings cuttings from Oahu. This was a strain of Arabica coffee from Ethiopia and known as Hawaiian coffee, or Kanaka Koppe.

1830-1840

1830s – World coffee production is about 2.5 million bags annually. Brazil produces about 600,000 bags of coffee annually making it the number one producer in the world.

Cuba is second producing about 600,000 bags of coffee. Third and fourth are Haiti and Java which each produce about 375,000 bags of coffee.

1840-1850

1840s – World coffee prices finally bottom out after a period of rapid coffee production growth in Java and Brazil. After this coffee prices rise strongly until the 1890s.

During this time the increase in value of coffee as a commodity encouraged many other nations to begin significant coffee production including Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Colombia.

1841 – The first cafetiere (coffee plunger) is invented by Elizabeth Dakin.

1842 – The first large commercial coffee plantation is established in the Hawaiian Islands when John Bernard and Godfrey Rhodes, a Frenchman and an Englishman, cultivate the crop in Hanalei Valley on the island of Kauai. Three years later they export their first crop which totals two hundred and forty-eight pounds of coffee beans. This is also the first coffee plantation in the United States.

1846 – In Miss Beecher’s Domestic Receipt-Book, Catharine E. Beecher writes, “Coffee it is best to buy by the bag, as it improves by keeping. Let it hang in the bag, in a dry place, and it loses its rank smell and taste.”

1849 – William Whiting, a lieutenant in the United States army, states, “Give a frontiersman coffee and tobacco, and he will endure any privation, suffer any hardship, but let him be without these two necessaries of the woods, and he becomes irresolute and murmuring.”

Next see Coffee History / 1850-1900