Rombouts Blog

There are many myths of how coffee spread around the world. One of my favourite stories is of how the bean arrived in Austria, in Vienna. In the 17th Century the Ottoman Empire was the largest empire and beginning to expand into Northern Europe. By this point coffee was the fully established drink for the Ottomans.



In 1683, the Ottomans launched their second seige of Vienna, the first one having taken place in 1529. This coffee fuelled army beseiged the city for two months, before a mighty battle, involving forces from Austria, Germany and Poland. Known as the Holy League, this was the first great army of the Christian states. This conflict would continue as the Austrian Empire grew and the Ottoman Empire slowly crumbled.

Legend has it that as the Ottomans were fleeing they abandoned many untold treasures, not least their bags of coffee beans. A Viennese spy, Franz Kolschitzky, who had supplied key information to help defeat the beseiging armies, recognised the coffee beans and used them to open the first coffeehouse in Vienna. The Viennese had mistaken them for camel food (twenty-five thousand camels had also been abandoned).

It was the Viennese that introduced drinking milk with coffee and filtering out the ground coffee before serving it.