These plants ranged from a historic botanical garden in the Netherlands to Dutch Guiana in 1719 and French Guiana in 1722, then to Brazil between 1760-1770, and then to the rest of the Western Hemisphere. In 1810, British Guiana exported over £22 million of coffee, becoming the world's largest exporter of coffee at the time. The coffee industry was later abandoned for the most popular profitable sugar industry.
Coffee beans harvested from Guyana are as rare and unique as the Amazon rainforest in which they grow. The original variety brought by Dutch settlers was coffee from Yemen, where coffee dates back to the 15th century. This coffee variety is known as Typica, the original species of Arabica coffee variety. In the 1900s, Coffea Liberica, which is now the rarest variety of coffee in the world, accounting for less than 1% of world trade, was introduced to Guyana to combat coffee rust. The coffee beans currently harvested in Guyana are a hybrid variety blended naturally with the old descendants of the original Typica from 1500 Yemen and the coffee variety, Coffea Liberica.
The production of green coffee beans is extremely limited, with no recent data on exports. Guyana Rainforest Coffee in Toronto, Canada, and Amy's Pomeroon Foods in Guyana are working to revive this lost industry.