As a foreword to our study about the world of coffee making, we should mention a few important beings that made an essential contribution to the history of the small coffee cherry seed, largely known by the name of 'coffee bean'.
- The pre-Christian goat, that lived in Felix Arabia (commonly known as Ethiopia) 1,000 years B.C., said to be the first soul ever to chew a coffee bean;
- Kaldi, the shepherd of the flock, that wanted to join his speechless companions in their after-party;
- The educated imam that, seeing the overall happiness of the aforementioned, proceeded to further experiments using coffee beans and water;
- The Ottoman Turks that introduced coffee in Constantinople and urged to open the first coffee shop in history (around the year 1475);
- The sultan that executed Khair Beg (Mecca Governor in the begining of the XVI century) who, in a moment of poor inspiration, tried to forbid cultivation of coffee;
- Pope Clement VIII who, around a.d. 1600, baptized the coffee bean, in order to make God indulgent towards Christian coffee consumers;
- Captain John Smith who shipped an important coffee stock over the Atlantic, to North America, in the same period;
- Italian people, who established the first coffee house in Europe, 45 years later;
- Baba Budan, an Indian fellow that managed to steel some fertile coffee beans and ship them out the Arabian territory (1650);
- Unidentified Dutch persons that cultivated the descendants of Baba Budan's seeds in Sri Lanka;
- Louis the XIV, that wanted the Dutch people to pay him a favor they owed him with one coffee tree specimen;
- The skilled botanists from the court of Louis XIV, that assembled the first European greenhouse in order to cultivate and perpetuate the coffee tree;
- The French naval officer Gabriel Mathieu do Clieu, who, in 1713, stole a fertile seed from France and shipped it to Martinique, the island that generously spread the coffee plant to the world;
- A fellow named Johann Sevastian Bach (distant relative to the great Johann Sebastian Bach) composed the Kaffee-Kantate, an ode to coffee and a satire to those who believed that coffee caused women to become sterile (1732);
- The rebels of the Boston Tea Party in 1773, who proclaimed coffee as national beverage;
- Achiles Gaggia, in Italy of the year 1946, who perfected Luigi Bezzera's great 1903 invention: the espresso machine.