(old Sri Lanka) by 1640. A testament to
thinking long-term, the V.O.C wouldn’t
see their first harvest until 1658 and even
then, not a particularly large or rich one.
Despite this, their time was not spent
idle and through buying up all the
coffee, where possible, from associated
merchants, Holland were the first to
supply the bean into Europe in any
great volume in 1640. As such, the first
European coffee shop – opening to the
public in Oxford, England in 1651 – was
supplied by beans from Amsterdam. It
would take the English a further 6 years
before they too would join in supply from
the London docks in 1657. Regardless
of the beginnings, by the next decade
almost everyone in England had heard of
a new bitter but racy brew called coffee
and with more coffee houses opening
up every year, swiftly developing into a
popular meeting place for the nation’s
educated elite, coffee had finally found a
new home in the West.
With this new popularity came massive
demands on supply and thanks to a few
humble plantings in Ceylon decades prior,
the Dutch were yet again ahead of the
curve and ready to begin taking Yemen
head-on in the supply of coffee.
For the remainder if the 17th century
however, Mocha would hold strong to
their monopoly. The Dutch having initially
failed to establish a strong enough yield
on planted coffee plants in Ceylon,
began again on the island of Java in 1699
where they were met with much more
success. The British, while late to the
concept, planted their own seedlings in
India four years earlier but, as with the
Dutch 60 years before, would not see any
major returns until decades later. By the
beginning of the 18th century Mocha still
held onto the chief supply of coffee with
an estimate 20,000 tons of beans sold
out of the port each year, but they were
fighting a losing battle.
With coffee showing signs of becoming
the new must have commodity for
merchants, all major trader