History of Coffee
Historically, Sri Lankan coffee has been compared with the best Arabica coffees of the world.
The history is fascinating; in any good history of coffee, it will tell you that the first place any colonial power brought coffee to was Sri Lanka.
Prior to the arrival of the coffee bush with the Dutch in 1658, the Moors had already brought coffee to Sri Lanka.
Ethiopia is the home of Arabica. Yemenis were the traders arriving to Sri Lanka with the coffee bush from the port of Mocha. They protected their crop by boiling their seeds, killing them so that no one else could grow them.
However, in 1623 a Dutch sea captain was presented a bouquet containing living seeds. They were grown in a greenhouse in Amsterdam for the first time outside of Ethiopia, and then brought to Sri Lanka.
During the British occupation of Java, they decided Sri Lanka should become a coffee colony. From 1814 onwards the forests were decimated to grow hundreds of thousands of acres of monoculture coffee. By 1850 Sri Lanka was exporting as much coffee as Brazil.
Monoculture growing exposed the bush to disease and in around 1848, Hemileia vastatrix, a disease associated with monocropping arrives and stays with the plant to this day.
As a result, from 1850, the crop starts to decrease. Remnants of the original Ethiopian crops survived. This is the coffee you are drinking today; many bushes with noticeable flavor notes from Ethiopia; notes of chocolate, citrus, blueberry.
The history is fascinating; in any good history of coffee, it will tell you that the first place any colonial power brought coffee to was Sri Lanka.
Prior to the arrival of the coffee bush with the Dutch in 1658, the Moors had already brought coffee to Sri Lanka.
Ethiopia is the home of Arabica. Yemenis were the traders arriving to Sri Lanka with the coffee bush from the port of Mocha. They protected their crop by boiling their seeds, killing them so that no one else could grow them.
However, in 1623 a Dutch sea captain was presented a bouquet containing living seeds. They were grown in a greenhouse in Amsterdam for the first time outside of Ethiopia, and then brought to Sri Lanka.
During the British occupation of Java, they decided Sri Lanka should become a coffee colony. From 1814 onwards the forests were decimated to grow hundreds of thousands of acres of monoculture coffee. By 1850 Sri Lanka was exporting as much coffee as Brazil.
Monoculture growing exposed the bush to disease and in around 1848, Hemileia vastatrix, a disease associated with monocropping arrives and stays with the plant to this day.
As a result, from 1850, the crop starts to decrease. Remnants of the original Ethiopian crops survived. This is the coffee you are drinking today; many bushes with noticeable flavor notes from Ethiopia; notes of chocolate, citrus, blueberry.