Coffee craze begins in tea-mad country

Sri Lanka’s tea – famed as some of the world’s best for more than a century, and still the country’s top export earner – now has keen competition from frothy cappuccinos, milky lattes and dark espressos.

Trendy coffee shops are springing up across the capital, Colombo, as local and foreign entrepreneurs venture back into business, following a ceasefire that halted nearly two decades of ferocious civil war.

Tea is Sri Lanka’s biggest industry and main export.

But coffee isn’t new to the lush tropical island off southern India.

It was the primary export crop in the early 1800s, when the country was called Ceylon, but a fungus destroyed its coffee industry in the 1870s.