Our romance with coffee is centuries old. Its origins are steeped in ancient tradition and folklore.

It is said that a goat herder in Ethiopia discovered coffee about 500 B.C., when he noticed that his animals became much livelier after eating the red berries of a particular bush.

From these accidental beginnings, the first commercial plantations were established in Arabia around the turn of the 15th century. The plantation owners closely guarded the secrets of their coffee trees until resourceful Dutch merchants smuggled some of the precious beans into Java.

Arab conquerors brought coffee to Turkey in the 1500's, Venetian traders carried it home to Italy about the mid-17th century and the first news of coffee in the new world came in the early 1600's.