The Irish coffee industry generates hundreds of million of euros every year. This is a pretty recent development - when I was growing up in the 1980s and 1990s the only coffee available was instant coffee. However Ireland's relationship with coffee did not begin in the last 20 years. If anything this is the second or even third wave of coffee culture to hit this country. In this show I Iook at the early history of coffee tracing the origins of the drink in Ireland back to the 17th centuryThis will bring us inside the coffee houses of 18th century Dublin when coffee was an elite drink in society.This episode also lifts the lid on a darker side to the Irish history of coffee – in the second half of the show I interview Cuban researcher Giselle Gonzalez Garcia who is researching the history of an Irish man who became one of the largest coffee producers in Cuba in the early 19th century. For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy