The History of Coffee
That nobody's really sure of...
I finish brewing a cup of Starbucks decaf Mocca Java, ground for paper filter, in my one cup Gevalia brewer. It's for my wife. The brewer does a good job, brewing the black beverage right into the cup.
It wasn't always this easy to make a cup of java. And the history of coffee is as enchanting as its brew.
Coffee is a berry, encased in a double-sided seed. As far back as history will tell us, coffee grew on shrubs in the Ethiopian rain forest on mountainsides. Here, in the cradle of mankind, at the point where the Arab and African worlds meet, the land is mountainous, an earthquake belt, and straight from the Bible. An area of poor people, Abyssinians as they were called, were a proud, independent people.
As legend has it, a goat herder named Kaldi who loved poetry, also love to follow his goats along the many trails deeply worn in the ancient landscape. With much time on his hands, Kaldi made up songs on his pipe. One afternoon he blew a shrilling note, and his goats stopped their grazing and followed young Kaldi home.
Then one day the goats did not come home. Try as he would, Kaldi blew and blew his pipe. Unfortunately, no goats returned. Perplexed, Kaldi climbed higher and listened for his herd. To his contentment, he heard them in the distance.
As he ran down the hillside, he suddenly came upon the goats. In the shadows of the rain forest the goats were running about butting each other, dancing on their hind legs, bleating with excitement. "They must be possessed!", he thought. "What else could it be?"
In amazement he watched and noted how the goats were chewing off the glossy green leaves and red berries of a nearby shrub. Was it the shrub that made the goats mad? Was it poison? Maybe they would all die! His father would certainly kill him!
The goats would not come home until hours later. Of course, they didn't die, but they did go right back out to that area in the forest the very next day. Kaldi followed. He first chewed some of the same glossy leaves. They were bitter. As he chewed, he felt a slow tingling, moving from his tongue down to his stomach and expanding to his entire body. Then he tried the berries. They were semi-sweet and the seeds were covered with a tasty mucilage. Finally, like the goats, he chewed the seeds.
According to the legend, Kaldi was as sprite as his goats. Words and music poured out of young Kaldi. He felt he would never get tired again. He told his father about the magical bushes and the word spread. Soon, coffee became an integral part of Ethiopian culture. When the Arabian physician Rhazes first mentions coffee in print in the tenth century, coffee had probably been cultivated by man for hundreds of years.
So how did coffee go from being a "chew" to a "brew"? Most likely the coffee beans and leaves (called "bunn" in those days), were brewed in boiling water as a weak tea. Some ground coffee beans and mixed it with fat for a quick pick me up. Others fermented the pulp and made coffee wine. Qishr is a sweet drink that was made from the lightly roasted husks of the coffee cherry (presently marketed as "kisher").
Most likely, in the 16th century, someone roasted the beans, ground them and made what we currently call a cup of coffee. Finally!