Coffea Arabica, the coffee plant from which the finest coffees are harvested, originated in central Ethiopia. Whether it was first roasted and ground for its stimulant properties in Yemen or Ethiopia is a matter of controversy. From Ethiopia and Yemen coffee beans spread to India (by theft of beans), then to Sri Lanka. Later, a coffee tree was brought to France, and eventually one of its offspring was stolen and taken to South America. From that tree sprang the majority of Arabica coffee trees currently growing in Central and South America. Eventually coffee was introduced to the island of Reunion, in the Indian Ocean, then called the Isle of Bourbon. There, a combination of spontaneous mutation and human selection produced a new variant, or “cultivar”, of the Arabica tree, var. bourbon, a tree bearing smaller beans with a different pattern. Finally, in 1893, coffee seed from Brazil was taken to Kenya and what is now Tanzania, only a few hundred miles south from the origin of coffee, Ethiopia, completing a circumnavigation of the globe that took over 200 years.
