Coffee, Coffee, Coffee!
You don't have to love coffee when writing a movie adaptation about the novel 'The Coffee Trader' - but it definitely helps. Luckily, in my case, I have coffee in my veins.
In a novel called The Coffee Trader, it might not be all that surprising to learn that Coffee plays a major role. The fate of the hero, as well as the becoming of the heroine, very much depend on coffee. The plot revolves around a secretly planned trade at the Amsterdam Stock Exchange … and coffee itself, throughout the script, is so present it’s almost a character in itself.
To learn more about the journey of adapting The Coffee Trader for the silver screen, from pitching to proposal and from research through various drafts, visit here. This time I’d like to share a bit about coffee and its marvelous history - especially also, of course, in the context of Dutch traders during that fabulous Golden Age.
Yes, I love coffee. But I have to admit that I’m not a coffee afficionado. I just like coffee. I’m not one of those people who decry everything, unless it comes out of an insanely expensive Italian coffee machine - and one that ideally is behind a bar in Rome. Mind you, I lived in Rome for two years and I did love my caffè/espresso, ristretto, caffè lungo, caffè doppio, caffè latte, caffè macchiato, latte macchiato, cappuccino, caffè ghiacciato, or even an affogato occasionally.
While all of those are just wonderful, I’ve lived in New York’s Hell’s Kitchen for far longer and became accustomed to that thing that is diner coffee, brewed hours ago, standing there, likely burnt - and your favorite waitress, the one who’s been there for fifty-seven years, comes by once in a while and says, “How about a refill, Honey?” And you say ‘Yes, please,’ and the world is in order. Yes, I admit it, I enjoy bad coffee.
Pardon me, I just digressed down personal coffee memory lanes. Back to the history of coffee! That lovely word came our way via the Dutch. They called it ‘koffie,’ something they picked up and adapted from the Turkish ‘kahve.’ And the Ottomans, finally, adapted it from the Arabic ‘qahwah.’ Interestingly, you know we call it the coffee bean, right? The coffee fruit is no bean, it is a berry. ‘Qahwah’ most likely meant ‘dark color’ - and so the drink was named for its color, not its fruit. The fruit, however, was called ‘bunn’ in Arabic. It’s not far from bunn to bean and so it is likely that this is why we call it a bean today.
While coffee remained unknown in Europe until its first arrival in the 16th century, it had already been a cherished drink in the Middle East for hundreds of years. Legend goes that, in the 13th century, Ethiopian herdsmen saw their goats eat the berries, then saw them jumping around all night. The shepherds tried the berries and noticed their invigorating powers … and so it goes!
In the 14h century, traders brought the coffee fruit from Ethiopia to Arabia, where it was cultivated and where the city of Mocha (yes, that’s where the coffee term ‘mocca’ comes from) became an important coffee trading port. Coffee houses made an appearance across the Middle East - but it wasn’t until 1554, that German traveler and botanist Leonhard Rauwolf brought back mention of the coffee plant.
When the coffee fruit finally did arrive in Europe, it was initially known as a medicinal product, a useful laxative - it would take another while for Europeans to wake up and smell the coffee!
It was the Republic of Venice that first brought quantities of coffee home - and Venetian merchants made coffee fashionable among the rich. The very first coffee house in Europe opened before 1650 in either Venice or Livorno. From there it quickly spread across Europe and just thirty years later in England alone there were more than three thousand coffee houses!
Since The Coffee Trader is a story about the fascinating time of the Netherlands’ Golden Age - let’s take a closer look at the Dutch - truth is, they bested everyone when it came to coffee!
From the moment the coffee fruit became known and seen as a valuable commodity, what merchants wanted was to not only trade the coffee fruit - but to get their hands on coffee trees to then set up their own plantations. Coffee plantations in the Middle East were guarded, of course - and it wasn’t until 1616 that a Dutch merchant managed to get some of those coffee trees (or bushes) back to Amsterdam. There they quickly grew in the botanical gardens - and from there that little act made a massive difference to the Dutch Republic.
The terrifically successful Dutch East India Company heavily traded eastward. And so those coffee bushes were taken to Sri Lanka (then Ceylon), where the Dutch set up coffee plantations - within a few years, the Dutch became the main suppliers of coffee to Europe. One of the reasons, it is said, that there were so many coffee houses across Europe by the end of the 17th century, was because both the Dutch East India Company and the British East India Company pushed for it. They had the product, they created the market - everyone was happy/caffeinated!
A word about the Dutch East India Company - actually, a word about the Dutch themselves. A few things come to mind when you think of the Netherlands, right? Tulips, of course. Rembrandt and Vermeer. Windmills and cheese and some such. But did you know that this fairly small country is, today, the second largest agricultural food exporter in the world? The Dutch are, and have been since the Golden Age, incredibly enterprising.
To get back to the Dutch East India Company: At a time when Spain, Portugal, France and England were already colonial powers, the Dutch, with the East India Company, completely left them in the dust, or better, in their wake. Over the course of the 17th century the Dutch alone sent nearly a million Europeans to work in Asia on a total of nearly 5’000 ships (all others together didn’t send nearly as many) and so they raked in huge profits for most of the century.
