Fast forward 120 years and the local roasting shop and coffee mill is a commonplace sight in most western cities – that is, until Hills Bros. begin packing roast coffee in vacuum tins, destroying the roasting shop industry for all but a few large companies in the process. A year later, in 1901, instant coffee was created by Japanese-American chemist Satori Kato in Chicago, and two years after that, a German coffee importer, Ludwig Roselius, decides to see if a batch of ruined coffee beans can be turned into something useful by his researchers. They notice the caffeine has been removed by the water that ruined the beans, and the decaffeinated product is soon marketed as Sanka.

Ust as with any other delicacy, when you tell people they can’t have it, they find a way to have it anyway, and so a man by the name of Baba Budan smuggled the precious beans to the region of Mysore, India, and began farming coffee. To this day, the offshoots of those original plants are still farmed in Mysore.

The idea was to keep coffee in Arabia, but it was a theory that worked better in concept than practice. Just as with any other delicacy, when you tell people they can’t have it, they find a way to have it anyway, and so a man by the name of Baba Budan smuggled the precious beans to the region of Mysore, India, and began farming coffee. To this day, the offshoots of those original plants are still farmed in Mysore.

In 1511, the governor of Mecca, Khair Beg, tried to ban coffee because he saw that its influence might encourage the emergence of an opposition to his government. Beg wasn’t a smart man, because the Sultan of Arabia considered coffee to be sacred, and duly had the Governor killed. In Arabia at the time, coffee plants were guarded like we guard nuclear plants today. The idea was to keep coffee in Arabia, but it was a theory that worked better in concept than practice. Just as with any other delicacy, when you tell people they can’t have it, they find a way to have it anyway, and so a man by the name of Baba Budan smuggled the precious beans to the region of Mysore, India, and began farming coffee. To this day, the offshoots of those original plants are still farmed in Mysore.

When the Dutch smuggled a coffee plant smuggled out of Arabia, they took it to Ceylon and Java, and soon had a near monopoly of their own. In 1723, the French used the same trick of sneaking a coffee seedling across the sea and turning it into an industry, when naval officer Gabriel Mathieu do Clieu stole a plant and shipped it to Martinique. 50 years later, there were over 19 million coffee trees on the island, and over time, 90% of the world’s commercial coffee crop would come from this one single plant.

All great things in this world come from a mistake, it seems. And coffee is no exception. But the history of coffee is one that is full of twists and turns, some political, some down to happenstance, but all of them have contributed to your double espresso being what it is today.