The history of coffee in the Americas starts with one of the most famous stories ever told about a coffee plant, and a lot of it might not be true.

A ship stuck dead still in the middle of the Atlantic. Water running out. And French naval officer Gabriel de Clieu pouring half his drinking water into a tiny coffee plant, every day, for a month. It’s printed on coffee bags and repeated in coffee history books. But almost every dramatic detail comes from one witness: de Clieu himself, writing about it fifty years later.

On this episode of Curiously Caffeinated, a coffee podcast hosted by a ten-year barista who’s still learning out loud, we tell the legend and then check it against the record.

In this episode:
☕ How a 1714 gift from Amsterdam gave France its first coffee tree
☕ Gabriel de Clieu, a mystery “lady of quality,” and a homemade glass greenhouse
☕ Pirates, a storm, a jealous saboteur, and the famous water ration, in his own words
☕ How coffee came to Martinique and grew to nearly 19 million trees, and who really did that work
☕ The Typica coffee variety and what Jamaica Blue Mountain has to do with this story
☕ Legend vs. record: was he really first, and did one tree really start coffee in Latin America?

If you’re enjoying the show, follow Curiously Caffeinated on Spotify so you never miss an episode. And send this one to your coffee person. You know exactly who I mean.

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Sources:
All About Coffee, William Ukers (1922): https://www.gutenberg.org/files/28500/28500-h/28500-h.htm
Typica variety, World Coffee Research: https://varieties.worldcoffeeresearch.org/varieties/typica
Gabriel de Clieu, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabriel_de_Clieu
History of Coffee, National Coffee Association: https://www.aboutcoffee.org/origins/history-of-coffee/