History
Coffee originated in the province of Kaffa, Ethiopia.  Between the 16th and 19th centuries it expanded and became widely popular in neighboring Arabian countries in part due to Islam’s prohibition of alcohol.  The “K'hawah”, or “energizer,” as it was known, was forbidden by the Muslim orthodox priests and conservatives in 1511 in Mecca and in 1532 in Cairo because of its stimulating effect.  Even so, the popularity of the product prompted authorities to cancel the decrees.  In the fifteenth century Muslims introduced coffee in Persia, Egypt, Northern Africa and Turkey, where the first café, Kiva Han, opened in 1475 in Constantinople.  By 1630 there were already hundreds of cafes in Cairo.  The Dutch and Portuguese brought coffee to Ceylon, Java, India and other regions of Asia and Africa.  It arrives to Europe around 1600 thanks to Venetian merchants where Pope Clement VIII said, “to leave only infidels the pleasure of this beverage would be a pity…”  The Muslims, protective of their Coffea Arabica plants, prohibited their export.

German botanical Léonard Rauwolf, a doctor who had recently returned from a ten year trip to the Middle East, is regarded as the person who first described coffee in a book published in 1583:  ¨It’s a beverage as black as ink¨.  It is useful against numerous health problems, especially those of the stomach.  Its consumers drink it in the morning in a porcelain cup that gets passed from hand to hand, and each one drinks a full cup.  It is prepared with water and the fruit of a bush called “bunnu.”
Photo: Cafe in Palestine
In the 1650s, coffee was imported and consumed regularly in England, and cafés opened in Oxford and in London. 
In 1670 Berlin opened its first café, and in Paris the Café Procope was the first of its kind to open in 1686.  It is said that it is here that coffee is first prepared by passing hot water through a filter with ground coffee. 
The story of the famous Viennese cafes began in 1683 with the Battle of Vienna.
In 1708, the governor of Java, Von Hoorn, took some plants to Holland.  He presented a coffee plant that had been planted in a Paris greenhouse to Louis the XIV, King of France.  In 1714, the infantry captain Français Gabriel Mathieu Desclieux, hid a cutting of one of these plants and took it to the slopes of Mount Pelée in Martinique and Santo Domingo where fifty years later 19 million plants would be cultivated. 
In the middle of the 18th century, every European city had cafés.  In 1732, Johann Sebastian Bach composed an ode to coffee.
During the 18th century coffee became more popular, and its cultivation in numerous tropical countries increased to satisfy the European demand.
In 1727 it spread from Sumatra to Brazil, then Peru, Paraguay and Colombia, French Guyana, Equatorial Africa, Haiti and Santo Domingo, Vietnam, Kenya and the Ivory Coast.  Finally, in 1748, it reaches the island of Cuba and from there to Costa Rica.
Later, it stretched to Puerto Rico and El Salvador in 1760, Guatemala and Bolivia in 1750, and Ecuador and Panama in 1784.