The History of Coffee

01Why Did Coffee Become Something Counted in 'Bags' Instead of 'Cups'?

When you look at coffee statistics, the unit you see isn't cups—it's "bags." A single bag equals 60 kilograms of unroasted green coffee beans. That is why a statement like "global production reached 189.7 million bags" refers neither to the weight of roasted beans nor to the number of cups people drank. The USDA even sets separate conversion factors: 1.19 for roasted coffee and 2.60 for instant coffee. If you don't check the units, you end up talking about completely different things while looking at the exact same number.

The timeframes can also feel unfamiliar, as you often see notations like "2026/27." This is because harvest seasons vary by country, making it impossible to bundle production statistics into a single calendar year. For Brazil, a crop year runs from July to the following June; for Colombia, Vietnam, and Ethiopia, it spans from October to the following September. Indonesia's runs from April to the following March. On the other hand, import and export statistics are often compiled by calendar year, so placing both figures side by side leads to discrepancies.

There are also practically only two species. Arabica thrives in cool highlands at altitudes of 1,200–1,500 meters, temperatures of 15–24°C, and annual rainfall of about 1,200–1,800 mm. Robusta can grow in lowlands, resists disease well, and contains about 2.7% caffeine by green bean weight—higher than Arabica's about 1.5%. It is the workhorse of instant coffee and budget blends.

The proportion between the two varies widely depending on the source. Here is one verified figure: in green coffee exports during the first 9 months of the 2025/26 crop year, Arabica accounted for 60.4%, compared to 63.7% in the same period a year earlier. It is a number whose answer changes depending on whether it is based on production or exports, and on which year you look at.

There isn't just one price, either. One is the futures price traded on the New York (Arabica) and London (Robusta) exchanges—commonly referred to as the "C price." The other is the Composite Indicator Price calculated by the International Coffee Organization, which aggregates actual physical transaction prices. In July 2026, the monthly average for the Composite Indicator Price was 287.26 cents per pound, but looking by group in that same month, Colombian Milds stood at 383.39 cents while Robusta stood at 184.78 cents. Even though both are "coffee," the gap is more than double.

Let's make one thing clear in advance: the prices mentioned in this story are the prices at which unroasted green beans are bought and sold on the international market. They are completely different numbers from the price of a cup sold in a café. The price of a cup is driven far more by roasting, logistics, rent, and labor, which is why a surge in green bean market prices does not cause the price of a cup to rise at the same rate.

The reason coffee has such meticulous units and standards is that before it is a beverage we drink, it is a commodity priced on an exchange. But it wasn't always this way. For a very long time, this was something to be forbidden, not sold.

Worth remembering Once you understand these units and standards, you will see how 'record-high prices' and 'record-high production forecasts' can stand side by side later in the story.

02Why the Legends of Coffee's Discovery Were All Born So Late

The most widely known story is that of Kaldi the goatherd. It is the tale of how a man tried some red berries after watching his goats eat them and frolic all through the night. The setting is said to be 9th-century Ethiopia. But this story first appeared in print in 1671, in a work by Antonio Fausto Naironi. It is a record that appeared 800 years after the era it was set in, and it does not appear in any earlier literature. Today, the prevailing view is that it was a much later invention.

The starting point verified by historical records is far later and far more modest: Sufi orders in 15th-century Yemen. They drank coffee to ward off drowsiness during nighttime devotions. Lore says that Jamal al-Din al-Dhabhani, the Mufti of Aden, adopted coffee around 1454, but because this too comes from traditions recorded in Arabic texts after the 16th century, it is difficult to pin down the exact year. One thing is certain: no historical or archaeological evidence has ever confirmed that coffee was consumed as a beverage before the 15th century.

India has a similar story. It is the tradition of the Sufi saint Baba Budan, who, on his way back from a pilgrimage to Mecca, smuggled seven raw coffee beans out of Yemen's port of Mocha inside his beard and planted them in the hills of Karnataka. That mountain range is still called Baba Budan Giri today. Yet details like "seven beans" and "inside his beard" belong entirely to folk tradition. It is best read as an origin myth for Indian coffee.

The roots of the word, by contrast, are quite clear. The English word "coffee" traces back to the Dutch "koffie," before that the Italian "caffè," before that the Ottoman Turkish "kahve," and ultimately the Arabic "qahwa." A theory that it came from Ethiopia's Kaffa region is also widespread, but the linguistic evidence follows the Arabic path. The fact that the coffee plant is native to the Kaffa region is a separate matter from the word's etymology. The Korean word "keopi" belongs to this same lineage, and during the Enlightenment period, terms like "gabae" or "yangtangguk" (Western soup) were used alongside it.

So coffee first enters the historical record not through tales of discovery, but as a tool for religious devotion. The practical need of people who had to stay awake through the night came first. And before long, that very wakefulness would make this drink a target of prohibition.

Worth remembering In this subject, the more famous a story is, the later the legend was born. Other 'famous anecdotes' that follow should be weighed with the exact same standard.

03Mecca Banned the Drink, and the Sultan Closed the Shops

In 1511, conservative religious leaders in Mecca banned coffee. The reason was its 'stimulating effect.' It is regarded as the earliest recorded coffee ban in history. Tales often follow this episode claiming that the governor executed coffee drinkers or burned sacks of coffee beans, but those details are generally seen as later exaggerations. What can be confirmed is simply the fact of the ban itself.

The ban did not last long. In 1524, Ottoman Sultan Suleiman I and Grand Mufti Ebussuud Efendi, the supreme religious jurist, overturned the prohibition through a religious ruling (fatwa). In effect, the very same religious authority reversed what it had once outlawed. Yet that was hardly the end of it. In 1532, a similar ban was issued in Cairo, and coffeehouses and warehouses were ransacked.

Around the same time, coffee made its way into the Ottoman capital. In the mid-1550s, two merchants—Hakem from Aleppo and Shems from Damascus—are said to have opened a coffeehouse in the Tahtakale district of Istanbul. The exact year varies depending on the source, as the account recorded by Ottoman chronicler Peçevi conflicts with claims that even earlier coffeehouses existed.

Then in 1632, Sultan Murad IV shut down coffeehouses, regarding them as 'hotbeds of sedition.' He banned tobacco and opium in the same year as well. Tales also circulate about the Sultan wandering the streets at night to execute violators, but because these stories are tangled up with anecdotes about bans on alcohol and tobacco, they cannot be definitively cited as executions for drinking coffee.

Line up these bans chronologically, and one pattern becomes clear. While Mecca initially took issue with the drink's stimulating effect, before long, the target of the bans shifted from the drink to the venue. In Cairo as in Istanbul, what authorities raided and shuttered were coffeehouses. The real problem was the fact that people were gathering in one place and talking. In an era when spaces where anyone could sit late into the night regardless of social status were exceedingly rare, the ruling power saw them as a new kind of public square.

And this anxiety was not unique to the Ottomans. Once coffee crossed into Europe, the King of England would grow just as uneasy about coffeehouses for the exact same reason.

Worth remembering The bans across the Islamic world soon shifted their target from the drink to the places where people gathered—a dynamic that would repeat itself once more in Europe.

04What Grew Out of Rooms Anyone Could Join for 1 Penny

Records clash head-on over where Europe's first coffeehouse opened. Many sources point to Venice, but one document claims 1645, another cites 1647, and yet another lists a cafe opened in 1683 at the Procuratie Nuove as Venice's first. All we can say with certainty is that these establishments began appearing in Europe around the mid-17th century.

The records from England are a bit more detailed. In 1650—or 1651, depending on the source—the first coffeehouse opened on Oxford's High Street. Its owner is recorded only as "Jacob the Jew." In 1654, Cirques Jobson opened a shop across the street, and the Queen's Lane Coffee House, which opened around that time, remains in business today. In 1652, Pasqua Rosée opened a shop in St. Michael's Alley in London. After that, the pace of expansion was astonishing. By 1675, there were more than 3,000 coffeehouses across England.

What made these rooms special was their low barrier to entry. Because anyone could pay 1 penny to enter, read newspapers, and join debates, they were called "penny universities." Charles II attempted to suppress them, claiming they spread "false, malicious and scandalous reports," but people kept pouring in. What the Ottoman Sultan had feared and what the King of England feared were not so different after all.

Yet these rooms gave birth to far more than mere conversation. In 1686, Edward Lloyd opened a coffeehouse on Tower Street in London. Sailors, merchants, and shipowners gathered there to exchange news about vessels and cargo, and to buy and sell marine insurance right on the spot. The shop moved to Lombard Street in 1691, and in 1734 it began publishing a newspaper called Lloyd's List. In 1774, its members relocated to the Royal Exchange and formed the Society of Lloyd's, which is today's Lloyd's of London. Meanwhile, brokers who gathered at Jonathan's Coffee-House changed their sign in 1773 to the Stock Exchange.

Vienna also has a long-believed legend. The story goes that Kulczycki opened the city's first cafe using bags of coffee abandoned by the Ottoman army after the 1683 Battle of Vienna. Today, however, it is widely accepted that the first Viennese coffeehouse was opened in 1685 by the Armenian merchant Johannes Diodato. The Kulczycki tale is largely seen as a romantic narrative polished by later generations.

Coffeehouses were places that sold drinks while giving birth to institutions. Insurance, exchanges, and newspapers all emerged from these rooms. It is hardly surprising, then, that kings found them so uncomfortable.

Worth remembering The very gathering place that had provoked bans elsewhere ended up creating insurance and stock exchanges here—institutions arose even before coffee became an ordinary commodity.

05While Kings Tried to Ban Coffee, the Plantations Were Already Across the Atlantic

Bans were repeated in Europe as well. Sweden began banning coffee in 1756 and repeated it five times across three kings: 1756–61, 1766–69, 1794–96, 1799–1802, and 1817–23. After the final ban was lifted in 1823, coffee actually became central to Swedish culture.

A stranger case unfolded in Prussia. Frederick II maintained a state coffee monopoly from 1781 to 1787. Beans could be roasted only in state-licensed facilities, and he hired around 400 wounded veterans as 'coffee sniffers' to catch illegal roasting. Dressed in uniform, they patrolled the streets, searching homes and frisking people. When the king died, the monopoly was abolished, and they lost their jobs.

This took a different form from earlier bans. Instead of outlawing coffee entirely, the state monopolized it and collected the profits. Yet it is hard to say definitively why this happened. The historical records consulted for this text tell us little about why Sweden repeated the ban five times, or why Prussia chose a monopoly of all things.

Some explain it as an effort to raise tax revenue, while others argue it targeted gathering places just like earlier bans. We found no conclusive evidence here to confirm either view. Instead, another development involving Europe and coffee during the same period remains crystal clear: rather than just buying and drinking it, they began growing it themselves.

Coffee trees had actually crossed the Atlantic before these bans took place. The figure most frequently cited in this chapter is the French naval officer Gabriel de Clieu. In 1720, he took a coffee seedling from the Paris Royal Botanical Garden aboard a ship to Martinique, reportedly sharing his own ration of drinking water with the seedling during the voyage. It is a charming story, but its weight must be measured carefully. The only source for this anecdote is a single memoir de Clieu himself published in a magazine in 1774, and it lacks independent corroboration.

More importantly, that single plant was not the beginning of coffee in the Americas. Before he arrived, coffee was already growing in Saint-Domingue in 1715 and Suriname in 1718. And in 1727, Francisco de Melo Palheta brought seeds from French Guiana and planted coffee trees in Pará, Brazil. The story goes that he secretly received them from the governor's wife, but that detail is also folklore.

What stands out here is the chronology. Around the time Sweden and Prussia were cracking down on coffee beans, what they were trying to ban was already growing in fields under European flags. That the age of prohibition and the age of cultivation actually overlapped—that is as far as the historical records take us.

Worth remembering The era of bans and the era of expanding plantations actually coincided. Now the story shifts from drinking coffee to growing it.

06Who Stood Behind Coffee as It Became a Global Commodity?

In 1789, in the French Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue—present-day Haiti—half of the cultivated land was planted with coffee. In the 1780s, about 60% of the coffee consumed in Europe came from here. That figure is based on European consumption, not global production.

That same year, there were 400,000 to 460,000 enslaved people on the island. The place where coffee first became a 'global commodity' was in fields built on slave labor. While coffeehouses in European cities were giving rise to newspapers and insurance, filling those cups across the Atlantic was carried out in this manner. With the Haitian Revolution that began in 1791, this system collapsed.

Brazil stepped in to fill that void. Trees planted in 1727 accounted for 30% of global production by the 1830s and 40% in the 1840s, and in 1852 Brazil became the world's largest coffee producer. It has never relinquished that position. Even in forecasts for the 2026/27 harvest year, Brazil is projected to supply about 40% of global production.

Brazil's coffee economy was also built on slave labor for its first century. After the importation of enslaved people was banned in 1850, plantations were transitioning to European immigrant labor, and Brazil abolished slavery in 1888. However, the fact that the form of labor changed did not necessarily mean conditions improved. The materials reviewed for this text do not reveal what the actual conditions of immigrant labor were like.

Today, an estimated 125 million people worldwide make their living from coffee. While widely cited, it is an estimate with no publicly disclosed calculation method, so it is better viewed as a gauge of scale rather than an exact figure. Looking strictly at coffee farmers with Fairtrade certification, the number is 775,000.

This was how coffee became a global commodity. Rather than a mere spread of taste, land and labor were rearranged. And once arranged like this, whenever prices fluctuate, it is already decided who is shaken first: not those who planted the trees, but those who work beneath them.

Worth remembering The journey of coffee becoming a commodity was not the spread of taste, but the rearrangement of land and labor. This structure is the root of the price issues that follow.

07Around 20 Years for Ceylon's Coffee Fields to Become Tea Fields

In 1867, an orange powder began coating the undersides of leaves in the coffee-growing regions of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). In November 1869, this fungus received the name Hemileia vastatrix, and growers called it "Emily the Destroyer." It was a disease that stripped the leaves and withered trees to death.

The results were devastating. Around 1890, Ceylon's coffee cultivation area dropped by about 80%, shrinking from 68,787 hectares to 14,170 hectares. The industry had essentially collapsed. Plantations switched to a crop that rust could not touch, and that crop was black tea. There is an interpretation that this fungus helped turn Britain into a "nation of tea drinkers." However, this remains an interpretation by historians, not a proven fact.

The fungus did not stop there. It spread to India in 1870, Sumatra in 1876, and Java in 1878, then crossed into Africa in the 20th century. In 1970, it crossed the Atlantic and landed in Brazil, reaching every major growing region by 1975. In 2012, a major epidemic hit 10 countries across Central America and the Caribbean. USAID estimated the damage from 2012 to 2014 at $1 billion, with more than 2 million people affected, while production in Central America dropped by 16%.

The sources consulted for this article cannot fully explain why rust spread so far and wide. Nor can it be blamed solely on growing conditions, since it spread regardless of altitude.

What we can explain, however, is why coffee-growing regions are so vulnerable to shocks. The conditions where Arabica thrives are narrow: an altitude of 1,200–1,500 m, temperatures between 15–24°C, and annual rainfall of 1,200–1,800 mm. Trees planted to fit a narrow window are shaken whenever that window shifts even slightly. Whether it is frost, drought, or rising temperatures, entire growing regions cluster under the same conditions, so they take the blow together. This is a different kind of vulnerability from susceptibility to disease. Robusta keeps entering the conversation because two traits overlap: it grows in lowlands, and, entirely apart from that, the species itself is resistant to disease.

There is one thing to add. In 2020, wild Arabica was assessed as "Endangered" on the IUCN Red List. Projections also suggest its population could decrease by 50–80% by 2088. However, this assessment applies to wild populations growing in places like the Ethiopian highlands. It does not mean the coffee cultivated on farms is on the brink of extinction.

Fungus and frost cannot be negotiated with. Even so, people would soon try to hold down these prices with their own hands. And they would attempt it twice.

Worth remembering The greatest forces swaying coffee prices lie outside the market. Here we see why the two attempts in the next chapter were such uphill battles.

08Over 80 Years of Propping Up Prices, and the Summer It Collapsed

In 1906, Brazil signed the Taubaté Agreement. The plan was to prop up international prices by having the government buy up surplus harvests and pull them off the market. It was called "valorization." This was an early case of a single country directly attempting to manipulate the global price of a commodity. In the 1920s, Brazil supplied about 80% of the world's coffee, but when the Great Depression arrived, this structure collapsed.

A new product even emerged while searching for ways to deal with leftover stockpiles. Commissioned by the Brazilian government, Nestlé had Swiss chemist Max Morgenthaler develop what was launched in 1938 as "Nescafé." It spread around the world after being included in US military rations during World War II. For the record, there is no established consensus on the very "first" instant coffee. Several candidates are cited side by side, including David Strang of Invercargill, New Zealand, in 1890, and Satori Kato, who worked in Chicago, in 1901.

Attempts to manage prices then shifted to the international stage. In 1962, the International Coffee Agreement was signed. The mechanism assigned export quotas to producing countries, cutting quotas whenever prices fell below a target and increasing them when they rose. In this way, global coffee prices were managed for 27 years.

On July 4, 1989, export quotas were suspended. Consuming countries wanted better coffee, and Brazil refused to accept a cut to its quota. The result was immediate. Prices that had averaged $1.34 per pound in the 5 years before the agreement plummeted to an average of $0.77 in the 5 years after. Valorization and export quotas took different approaches, but the core idea was identical: prop up prices by restricting supply. And both collapsed.

In 2001, prices crashed. Following the lifting of the US embargo, Vietnam entered the market in earnest starting in 1994, which coincided with increased production from Brazil, creating a massive oversupply. Smallholder farmers across Central America and East Africa took a direct hit, in what is often called the "coffee crisis." While many writings cite specific figures for the lowest price during this period, some of those numbers cannot be verified in primary sources, so here we will simply note that it was at its lowest level in 30 years.

Around that time, a different approach began to grow. In 1988, the Max Havelaar certification was launched in the Netherlands, and in 1997, four labeling initiatives merged to form Fairtrade International. In 2024, Fairtrade-certified coffee reached 525,000 tons, the premium paid to farmers was 58 million euros, and 552 producer organizations participated. However, between 2020 and 2024, the Fairtrade Minimum Price was higher than the New York "C" market price only 33% of the time. When prices are rising, the minimum price has nothing to do.

Worth remembering Both attempts to prop up prices by restricting supply collapsed. Today's price swings play out across the void left in their wake.

09From Joseon's Coffee to Instant Packets: The Path Korea Has Walked

For a long time, conventional wisdom held that King Gojong was the first person in Korea to drink coffee. This was often attributed to Antoinette Sontag, who oversaw Western cuisine at the royal court following the King's 1896 refuge at the Russian legation. Sontag opened the Sontag Hotel in 1902, featuring a space on the 1st floor that served coffee.

Yet there are multiple earlier records. In 1861, French Catholic bishop Siméon-François Berneux, who was stationed in Joseon, sent a letter to the Paris Foreign Missions Society requesting '40 livres of coffee and 100 livres of brown sugar.' This confirms that coffee had already arrived on Joseon soil. There is also a distinct record of a Korean person drinking it. On July 27, 1884, Min Geon-ho, a clerk at the Busan Customs office, noted in his diary that he was served gabicha (coffee) by Tang Shaoyi of the Qing Dynasty. In January of that same year, American astronomer Percival Lowell recalled drinking coffee by the Han River as 'the latest Joseon fashion after a meal,' and in early 1895, Isabella Bird Bishop wrote that coffee was served at a royal banquet.

Even so, we still cannot definitively nail down who was first. New records continue to come to light, and various local municipalities each claim their own 'first.' The safest conclusion we can draw is simply this: there are several documented records that predate King Gojong.

Coffee has also found itself at the center of high-stakes historical drama. On the evening of September 11, 1898, opium was slipped into coffee served to King Gojong and the Crown Prince. King Gojong took only a few sips because of its strange taste, but the Crown Prince drank nearly all of his and collapsed unconscious. The plot was revealed to have been orchestrated by Kim Hong-ryuk, a former Russian interpreter harboring a grudge over his exile; on October 10, three people involved were sentenced to death. This incident remains recorded in The Independent, the Annals of King Gojong, and the Diaries of the Royal Secretariat.

Korean-style coffee culture took root much later. In 1927, a dabang (traditional tearoom) opened in Myeongdong, and around the time of the Korean War, instant coffee spread widely through the US military. Then, in 1976, Dongsuh Foods introduced 'coffee mix,' packaging coffee, sugar, and creamer together in a single packet. It is widely known as the world's first instant coffee mix, though we phrase it with care since internationally verified primary sources have yet to be confirmed. Some also view Gabaedang—a late-Joseon novelty where coffee powder was packed inside sugar cubes—as its spiritual predecessor.

In 1999, Korea's first Starbucks store opened its doors in front of Ewha Womans University. Originally, Starbucks had started on March 30, 1971, in Seattle as a retailer selling coffee beans and brewing equipment, not prepared beverages. After Howard Schultz acquired it in 1987 and converted it into espresso bars, it had 140 locations when it went public in June 1992. Since then, the number of coffee shops in Korea surged from about 49,600 in 2015 to surpass 100,000 in 2022.

Worth remembering Korea's coffee history did not begin with the palate of a single monarch; it traveled through open ports, missionaries, and wartime rations before being sealed into an instant packet.

10Why Prices Jumped in the Very Year Record Production Was Forecast

In February 2025, the International Coffee Organization's composite indicator price reached an all-time monthly average high of 354.32 cents per pound. It surpassed the previous record of 305.13 cents set in March 1977 for the first time in 48 years. Keep in mind, however, that this is in nominal terms. When adjusted for inflation into real prices, coffee in 1977 was still considerably more expensive. Omitting this qualifier makes the statement factually incorrect.

Tariffs also shook the market. In July 2025, the United States imposed an additional 40 percentage point tariff on Brazilian coffee, pushing the total duty to 50% and bringing purchases by American buyers to a virtual standstill. In the meantime, China newly approved 183 Brazilian export facilities. Then, on November 21, the US eliminated the coffee tariffs on Brazilian goods, retroactively applying the waiver to November 13. Even so, controversies lingered through January 2026 over whether the 50% tariff still applied to instant coffee. It would be wrong to claim that 'all coffee tariffs vanished.'

That brings us to 2026. The USDA projected global coffee production for the 2026/27 harvest year at an all-time high of 189.7 million bags, measured in standard 60kg bags of green coffee. It anticipated records across the board: a record 71.9 million bags for Brazil, global green coffee exports of 131.4 million bags, and global consumption reaching 179.7 million bags. It helps to remember that these are not finalized results, but preliminary forecasts scheduled for revision in December 2026.

Yet in July of that same year, the International Coffee Organization's indicator price jumped 15.4% in a single month to 287.26 cents per pound due to weather worries in Brazil. A forecast for record-high production and soaring prices stood side by side in the very same period. That is because prices are moved not by global aggregate volumes alone, but by immediate weather in Brazil, remaining stockpiles, and sentiment in the futures markets. World ending stocks—the leftover inventory at the close of the season—had dropped by 15.5 million bags between 2020/21 and 2024/25, before recovering for two straight years to a projected 26.3 million bags in 2026/27.

Let's also put the overall market size in perspective. In 2025, global coffee exports totaled $71.8 billion. This figure is based on the international Harmonized System code for coffee (HS 0901) and includes re-exports. The leaders were Brazil at $14.9 billion, Vietnam at $6 billion, and Colombia at $5.96 billion. Countries like Germany, Switzerland, and Italy rank near the top not because they grow coffee, but because they are re-exporters that import, roast, and resell it abroad. Confusing export rankings with coffee production rankings gives you a completely skewed picture.

While we are here, let's clear up a long-standing myth. It is widely claimed that coffee is the 'second most traded commodity after oil.' That is simply not true. In 2024, global crude oil exports reached $1.259 trillion—an entirely different order of magnitude. The original statement was that coffee was 'the second most valuable commodity exported by developing countries,' and even that was framed in the past tense, describing the period around 1970–2000.

Worth remembering Headlines touting 'all-time record prices' and 'record-high production forecasts' do not contradict each other; you just need to check which benchmark the numbers represent.

11What Should We Watch Going Forward?

There is no need to try to predict the future. Instead, guided by the rules this story has revealed, let us summarize what to watch so you can be the first to notice when the board begins to shift.

First is Brazil's weather and biennial bearing. An Arabica tree yields less the year after a bumper crop. After pouring its energy into bearing fruit one year, it channels its energy into growing branches the next. Because Brazil has uniform terrain and relies on mechanical pruning and harvesting, this cycle is widely explained as occurring across the entire country simultaneously. With Brazil accounting for about 40% of global production, many explain that Brazil's 'on-years' and 'off-years' play a major role in the annual fluctuations of global Arabica supply. There was even a black frost on July 18, 1975, that caused prices to double the following year.

Second is inventories. Prices react more sensitively to what is left over than to that year's total production. Looking at whether ending stock forecasts are trending upward or downward makes the exact same production figure read completely differently.

Third is which price is being cited. The Coffee C futures price on the exchange and the International Coffee Organization's Composite Indicator Price are completely different numbers. Looking at the group indicator prices for July 2026 alone, Colombian Milds stood at 383.39 cents and Robusta at 184.78 cents—a gap of more than double. When a headline simply mentions 'coffee prices,' it is best to first check which category and which point in time that number comes from.

Fourth is trade flows. The 2025 U.S. tariff measures were imposed and then lifted within a span of months, and during that time, the destinations of Brazilian coffee actually shifted. Because tariffs and certification regulations change on such short cycles, it is wise to always look at the dates.

Fifth is the land. Arabica's growing window is narrow, and coffee leaf rust has never disappeared. How high Robusta's share rises, how widely resistant varieties spread, and whether growing altitudes climb higher will redraw the map ahead. This is a story that unfolds over decades, not just a few years.

Finally, just one more thing. In this history, neither those who tried to stop coffee nor those who tried to pin down its price ever got their way. Mecca, the Ottomans, Sweden, and Prussia could not stop it, and Brazil's valorization and the International Coffee Agreement both collapsed in the end. What remains today is a price that no one sets targets for, and an estimated 125 million people whose livelihoods depend on that price. The next time you read an article about coffee prices, it is worth remembering that those people stand behind the fluctuating numbers.

Worth remembering This is not about forecasting, but how to watch the game: Brazil's weather, inventories, which price is cited, tariffs, and the land—those five are all you need to watch.