Coffee is so popular today that you might think people have always been drinking it. But most of the world started drinking coffee just a few hundred years ago.
Coffee plants first grew wild in East Africa and Arabia. Around 850, according to an Arab legend, a young goat herder was guarding his herd when he noticed that his goats began to act excitedly after eating the berries of a shrub. The goatherd tasted the berries and found that they tasted good. Coffee soon became popular throughout Arabia, and eventually spread to Europe during the 16th and 17th centuries.
Until 1700, all the coffee in the world came from Arabia, as the Arabs guarded the secret of how it was grown. Eventually, a Dutch merchant smuggled some coffee plants and planted them on the island of Java in the East Indies. Soon, much of the coffee consumed in the world came from this place, so it began to be known as "Java".
Some French traders planted coffee in South America and kept the way it was grown a secret. However, a Brazilian soldier won the heart of a French woman, and she gave him some coffee seeds. The Brazilians then began to grow their own coffee, and today Brazil is the largest coffee producer in the world.
Americans drink about 1,200,000,000 kilos of coffee a year - equivalent to one-third of all the coffee produced worldwide.
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