MyWeku

The factual origins of the plant and its use in beverages are, unfortunately, lost to the murky mists of time. However, there is a coffee legend that has taken hold and, rather than skip right to history, it bears repeating because of the interesting visuals it conjures up.

In about 850 AD, sometime in the morning, an Ethiopian goatherd named Kaldi apparently noticed that his flock was missing. His search found them dancing from one coffee shrub to another, merrily eating its small red fruit (which contains the coffee seeds, known more popularly as beans). Inspiration, of course, struck and Kaldi tried the fruit himself, discovered its stimulating effect, and spread his joy (eventually) to the world at large. It’s a charming story, if not chock full of detail.

What we do know is that the 25 major species of coffee are all indigenous to tropical Africa (and Madagascar, and some other islands in the Indian Ocean). Even more to the point, it is Ethiopian coffee that is the genetic epicentre of Arabica coffee

Like the mitochondrial Eve, it is Africa, specifically Ethiopia, that is very likely the origin of the coffee plant. However, there is no evidence to suggest that the Kaffa province of south-western Ethiopia formerly known as Kefa has anything to do with the word coffee. Instead, our derivation of the source of the word seems to parallel its early movement through the globe.

Some of the first historical evidence of the presence of coffee comes from Yemen in the mid-15th century, where it was first cultivated, although it was very likely used in its wild form in Ethiopia beforehand. It is no coincidence that Yemen, located at the south-western tip of the Arabian Peninsula is just a short water trip across the Red Sea to Eritrea formerly part of Ethiopia.

Once in the Arab world, coffee spread quickly, popularized by Sufi religious practices involving all-night ceremonies and the need to be awake. By the first decades of the sixteenth century, in the early 1500s, it had spread to Mecca (up the coast) and Cairo (further up to the Mediterranean) and by 1555 it had reached Istanbul in modern day Turkey, but once known as Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire. Hence the derivation of the word coffee which is traced through the arabic – qahwa and the Turkish – kahveh

The galloping spread of this popular beverage, however, did not occur with religious use, although this was an important aspect early on. Instead, it spread with new Arab social interaction that centred around the coffeehouse, as opposed to the mosque. By the 1560s, in a brief span of only 10 years, there were over 600 coffeehouses in Istanbul alone. By the end of the 1600s, Cairo had become the world’s central coffee market, although the crop was grown solely in Eritrea and Yemen. With Cairo as the nexus of the coffee world, it was only a matter of time before it came into contact with Europe.

It was not European coffee drinkers that spread the bean, though; it was European mercantile ventures, such as the Dutch East India Company, that were attracted by the opportunity to transport the product throughout Near Eastern and Asian markets. The port of Mokha in Yemen became home to some of the big trading houses of these European merchants. As far as coffee for European consumption went, it was the Italians who first piped it through Venice in 1640. The coffeehouse was not far behind and by the 1660s in Paris, an “Armenian” in Paris was equivalent to being a coffee seller, since the first coffeehouses were opened by Near Eastern immigrants. Coffee, the beverage and the culture, exploded through the continent in the late 1600s and it was not long before Europeans began trying to grow their own.

By the early 1700s, the Dutch, English, and French were all beginning their own plantations in various parts of the world (Java, Surinam, on Bourbon Island in the Indian Ocean, Haiti, Jamaica) followed by the Portuguese planting it in Brazil and Spain planting it in Cuba. After 1750, worldwide coffee production soared and the spread of coffee as a beverage and a culture never looked back. Now a staple of Western society, as much as it had been in Eastern and Middle Eastern cultures, coffee seems to be an ingredient in the modern world with which we could hardly do without.

©myweku.com