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Central American Coffee and Gabriel de Clieu: A Trying Yet Fruitful Endeavor

In the early part of the eighteenth century, coffee was a luxury, relatively scarce and imported from far away and mysterious places. De Clieu had a plantation in the northwest region of Martinique, one of the Caribbean islands that rain down on South America from Puerto Rico. He knew the climate, where cocoa was thriving at the time, was right for coffee propagation, and he imagined growing coffee would make him a wealthy man.

The Rise of Central American Coffee

By hook or by crook, by boat or by monk, the coffee shrub was emancipated from what is now Yemen in the mid-seventeenth century, but it did not arrive in the new world for another 60 years or so, and when it did, it came from Java by way of Amsterdam and France. Although coffee was grown in India and Sri Lanka over those six decades, the Dutch, growing coffee in Java, were the first to grow enough coffee for export and challenge Yemen and her famed port at Mocha. So, for all practical purposes, the old Mocha Java blend wasn’t a choice so much as, well, the only coffees available to blend for many years.

Colombian Coffee History

When did Colombia start growing coffee? As with many coffee origins, it is believed that coffee was first brought to Colombia by priests, arriving, perhaps, within a decade or two after coffee first came to the Americas via the Caribbean in the first half of the 17th century. It was likely a garden crop grown for local consumption and barter for decades. Unlike other coffee regions, we have the story of a priest named Francisco Romero, who could be called the father of commercial coffee cultivation in Colombia.

While the history of Costa rican coffee  is the subject of some debate, it is generally estimated that coffee came to Costa Rica as early as 1779. Within 50 years, Costa Rican coffee beans were generating more revenue than any other crop, and by the 1830s, the country was growing more coffee than the ships heading south could take. 

Back then, virtually no infrastructure existed for transporting even a small amount of green coffee to the east coast of Costa Rica. But by 1850, almost all green Costa Rican coffee was being shipped to London through an exclusive arrangement with a single shipping company. This arrangement brought back advanced technologies of the time, which is one of the reasons why Costa Rica was an early adopter of advances in coffee production.

Burundi and Rwanda are like two pieces of a puzzle that, as you hold them in your hand, look like they should go together, but when you try and put them together, they don’t really fit. For over 60 years, Europeans, the League of Nations, and the United Nations, tried to force these two pieces of their African puzzle together, but even the name they chose for this “single” country, Ruanda-Urundi, seemed to signal the joining was artificial.