Ancient history tells the story of Kaldi, an Ethiopian goat-herder, thought to be the first to discover the mythical properties of coffee. He was so amazed at the dancing of his goats after they had eaten some berries from a nearby shrub that he decided to try some of the ripe, red ‘cherries’ for himself. The pleasant, stimulating effect they produced led him to share his discovery with the local monks. Coffee quickly evolved into a ceremonial drink. Keeping the monks awake during their long hours of prayer.
Arabic scientific documents dating from around AD 900 refer to a beverage drunk in Ethiopia, Known as ‘buna’ (coffee in Amharic), and the similarities in the words suggests that this could be one of the earliest references to Ethiopian, coffee in its brewed form. It is recorded that in 1454 the Mufti of Aden visited Ethiopia, and saw his own countrymen drinking coffee there. He was reportedly impressed with the drink, which cured him of some affliction, and his approval made it soon popular among the dervishes of the Yemen who used it in religious ceremonies, and introduced it to Mecca
From the Arabian Peninsula coffee traveled to the East. The Arabs are credited with first bringing coffee to Sri Lanka (Ceylon) as early as 1505 by one Baba Budan on his return from a pilgrimage to Mecca in the 17th century.
By 1517 coffee had reached Constantinople, following the conquest of Egypt by Salim I, and it was established in Damascus by 1530. Coffee houses were opened in Constantinople in 1554, and their advent provoked religiously inspired riots that temporarily closed them. But they survived their critics, and their luxurious interiors became a regular rendezvous for those engaged in radical political thought and dissent.
Venetian traders had introduced coffee to Europe by 1615, a few years later than tea which had appeared in 1610. Again its introduction aroused controversy in Italy when some clerics, like the mullahs of Mecca, suggested it should be excommunicated, as it was the Devil’s work. However, Pope Clement VIII (1592- 1605) enjoyed it so much that he declared that ‘coffee should be baptized to make it a true Christian drink.’
The first coffee house opened in Venice in 1683. The famous Café Florian in the Piazza San Marco, established in 1720, is the oldest surviving coffee house in Europe. Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries coffee houses proliferated in Europe. Nothing quite like the like the coffee houses, or café, had ever existed before, the novelty of a place to enjoy a relatively inexpensive and stimulating beverage in convivial company established a social habit that has endured for over 400 years.
In 1616 the Dutch gained a head start in the grand-scale cultivation by taking a coffee plant from Mocha to the Netherlands, and they began cultivation in Sri Lanka in1658. In 1699 cuttings were successfully transplanted from Malabar to Java. Samples of Java coffee plants were sent to Amsterdam in 1706, were seedlings were grown in botanical gardens and distributed to horticulturists throughout Europe.
A few years later, in 1718, the Dutch transplanted the coffee to Surinam and soon after the plant became widely established in South America, which was to become the coffee center of the world.
In 1878 the story of coffee’s journey around the world came full circle when the British laid foundations of Kenya’s coffee industry by introducing plants to British East Africa right next to neighboring Ethiopia, where coffee had first been discovered a 1,000 years before.
Today Ethiopia, is Africa’s major exporter of Arabica beans, the quality coffee of the world, and the variety that originated in Ethiopia, is still the only variety grown there. Coffea Arabica, which was identified by the botanist Linnaeus in 1753, is one of the two major species used in most production, and presently accounts around 70 per cent of the world’s coffee.
In Ethiopia’s province of Kaffa,from which its name derives, a large proportion of the arabica trees grow wild amidst the rolling hills and forests of the fertile and beautiful region.
