About this lot
Moka-Java is the world’s oldest recorded coffee blend. There is a simple reason for this: Moka (from the rugged, fertile southern tip of the Arabian peninsula, now part of the Republic of Yemen) was the world’s first commercial coffee, and Java (from the then-Dutch colony in what is now Indonesia) was more or less the second. Although the arabica coffee tree originated across the Red Sea in Ethiopia, Yemen Moka was the first coffee to be traded outside the region in which it was grown. We call it Moka because, for over two hundred years, virtually all of it was shipped through the Red Seaport of Al-Makha or Moka. When the Dutch successfully established commercial coffee growing in their new colony in Java, they added a second origin–Java–to Europe’s globalizing coffee menu. Thus Moka-Java, a blend that for eighteenth-century Europeans combined the extreme ends of their coffee-growing wor