Over the next decades the fungus, Hemilia vastatrix (coffee rust), spread to plantations worldwide, ruining whole crops of Coffea arabica and, in places like Ceylon, forcing a wholesale switch to the production of tea. In 1861 British explorers found a small splotchy fungus on the leaves of some wild coffee plants near Kenya’s Lake Victoria. Coffee introduced the first popular consumer drip-filter coffee maker. The percolator’s American heyday stretched from about 1870 (when it began to supplant boiled coffee) until 1972, when Mr. The source of much overdone American coffee, the percolator-which endlessly cycles bubbling coffee through ever-more-bitter filtered grounds-was invented in the 1780s by Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford, an American-born scientist who fled to Europe during the Revolutionary War. Camille Desmoulins gave his compatriots a famous call to arms at Paris’s Cafe de Foy, two days before the storming of the Bastille. In France, cafes were central for the exchange of revolutionary ideas. The London Stock Exchange and the insurance underwriter Lloyd’s both got their start in 18th century coffeehouses. For Europeans, coffeehouses quickly became vital places for the exchange of news and ideas and for doing business. By 1663 there were 82 coffeehouses in London 40 years later there were more than 500. The first cafes and coffeehouses in Europe opened in the 17th century. In Central America and Southeast Asia, colonial governments often imposed quotas that forced native populations to produce solely coffee, leaving them vulnerable to poverty and famine. In Brazil, slave labor was the backbone of the coffee industry until the late 1800s. Because coffee is native to equatorial Africa, it only grows easily in the tropics, so European colonial interests pushed for increased coffee production in Latin America, Africa, Southeast Asia and Oceania. Seeds were smuggled out by intrepid traders first by Muslim pilgrims headed to southern India and later to Java, Indonesia, by the Dutch, who cultivated it for export. When the Ottomans occupied Yemen in 1536, they tried to maintain a monopoly on production of the beverage, banning the export of coffee beans that hadn’t first been sterilized.
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