When: September 29
National Coffee Day on September 29 celebrates the world's most popular caffeinated beverage — a daily ritual for 66% of Americans and a commodity second only to oil in global trade.
Coffee was a political drink before it was a morning ritual. Every government that tried to ban it failed. Every culture that adopted it built institutions around it.
Ethiopia is coffee's origin. Wild Coffea arabica plants still grow in the forests of the Kaffa province, and the Ethiopian coffee ceremony — in which beans are roasted fresh over coals, ground by hand, brewed three times, and served over hours of conversation — is among the oldest continuous food rituals in the world. From Ethiopia, coffee cultivation moved to Yemen in the 15th century. The port of Mocha gave its name to one of the earliest global trade hubs. Yemeni merchants guarded their monopoly so carefully that all exported beans were boiled or roasted to prevent germination. The monopoly held for two centuries, until a Muslim pilgrim smuggled live plants out of Mecca, and within decades coffee spread to India, the Dutch East Indies, the Caribbean, and the Americas. Governments kept trying to stop it. Coffee houses in 16th-century Constantinople were banned by Suleiman the Magnificent and Murad IV — they were gathering places for dissidents, which was the point. Charles II tried...