Coffee History

 The most popular story told, about coffee, is of a goat herder named Kaldi who went looking for his flock and found them dancing wildly. He soon discovered that they were eating the leaves and berries of a certain plant. When he tried some of the berries, he quickly felt energized. Soon, a monk noticed Kaldi's vigor, and he asked the goatherd how that came to be; Kaldi told him about the plant, and the monk picked the berries and brought them back to the monastery, where the monks used them to stay awake for late night prayer and study. Unfortunately, this story is almost certainly simply a legend, and the true story of how the effects of the coffee bean were discovered is lost to history. What is not in dispute is that coffee originated in the highlands of Ethiopia.

Originally, the beans were not roasted and brewed; one of the first coffee drinks was, ironically, a tea (or, more properly, an infusion) brewed from the leaves and cherries. As with most human endeavors, an alcoholic beverage (a wine made from the fermented pulp) was also also made. It wasn't until about five hundred years ago that someone, whose name has also been lost to history, first roasted the beans and before brewing them.

The bean became cultivated on plantations and was finally made into a drink - qahwa, that which prevents sleep - shortly thereafter. A delicacy and a secret, coffee was originally exclusive to the plantations of Muslim nations until it was smuggled to India, Western Europe and eventually the New World where it took root in Latin and South America with a vengeance.

In fact, the Dutch, early traders and cultivators of coffee, unwittingly provided the Americas with the coffee plant that accounted for the entire Western coffee industry and 90 percent of the world's coffee. This coffee bush was a gift to Louis XIV of France; the culprit/genius was naval officer Gabriel Mathieu do Clieu who stole a seedling from the bush and transported it to the French-occupied Caribbean island of Martinique.

Baptized for Christian consumption by Pope Clement VIII, who said, "Coffee is so delicious, it would be a pity to let the infidels have exclusive use of it." Enough justification for a sultan to execute the governor of Mecca who tried to ban it. The subject of an ode composed by Johann Sebastian Bach. Prohibition's godsend.

From these origins, coffee has become the second largest commodity, after oil. Coffee grows on one percent of the world's land, eleven million hectares.

source: www.thecoffeefaq.com , www.theroasterie.com