Coffee's Mysterious Origins
The myths and facts surrounding the history of coffee cultivation and its use as a beverage.
It is said that an Ethiopian goatherd (often called Kaldi) discovered coffee. He saw his goats cavorting in a field one day and wondered why they were acting so, well, exceptionally goaty. Noticing they were eating the fruits of a perennially struggling little tree, he tried one hinself. He found the fruit of the coffee tree to be vaguely sweet and otherwise bland, yet mildly refreshing. He also noticed that after a few minutes he was feeling especially goaty himself: capering, gamboling, and cavorting around.
Realizing that the usual boundaries of propriety between a goatherd and his goats were in a state of alarming deterioration, the noble (could the discoverer of coffee be any less?) goatherd composed himself as best he could, gathered up a handful of the fruits, and took them to an abbot. The abbot tried them and thought they were a gift from God, given to him so that he and his monks could pray all night. In another version of the story, the abbot walked by the goats and the goatherd and saw what was going on, and decided he wanted the stuff for himself and his monks.
The arabica coffee tree is indigenous to Ethiopia (the home of the apocryphal Kaldi), and its cherries were first eaten there, initially as fresh fruit. Subsequently, a dried pemmican-like form was made, especially for travel, and this was either eaten straight or mixed with dried grain. These two preparations comprised, respectively, a premedieval Powerbar and a very early form of granola. (The seeds, or beans, of the fruit were not included in either.)
The usefulness of the fruit of the coffee tree thus established, the trees, or their viable seeds, were transported to Yemen and cultivated there. It was in Yemen that a sun tea made of coffee cherries, beans, and a few leaves first appeared. Shortly thereafter, in all likelihood, this sweetened sun tea spontaneously fermented, thereby providing the popular combination of alcohol and caffeine that today is more typically consumed in the form of Irish coffee.
This coffee wine was the first beverage to be named with the original word for coffee: qahwah. This word does not mean "giver of strength" as is often proposed in books and articles on coffee, but rather comes from an Arabic verb meaning "to put one off." Coffee wine "put one off" sleep when it was drunk in moderation and "put one off" essentially everything if consumed to excess. (Its recreational potential notwithstanding, qahwah was generally considered a medicinal beverage, there being other and more easily produced fermented beverages available, notably a form of mead, a wine made from honey and water.)
All of this early coffee history occurred before the prophet Muhammad established the Islamic faith. Sometime shortly after his arrival in Medina in A.D. 622 and before his death in 632, he decreed that the faithful should not consume any alcoholic beverages, purportedly due to the rampant drunkenness he found in that city. After that time only the coffee sun tea, known as qishr, was consumed. Qishr is still drunk today, either as a sun tea or brewed by boiling water.
It was not until the early 1400s, though, that coffee (as we know it) first appeared. This was about the same time that metal pots, in which water could be boiled over a fire, appeared in that part of the world. This made it possible for the coffee sun tea to be made more quickly by boiling leaves, cherries, and seeds in water. This combination of fire and coffee seeds probably accidentally led to the happy creation of coffee. Perhaps a pot of tea boiled dry or tipped into the fire, giving the world the first (very rustic) brewed coffee from roasted beans. Alternatively, a store of dried cherries and beans might have caught on fire and was then doused with water. In either case, coffee (as we know it) could not have been prepared without the ability to boil water.
As coffee gained in popularity, the sixteenth-century Mohammeddans found reason to complain. Ironically, they considered coffee to be a threat to religious sobriety, especially upon witnessing that followers were more likely to frequent streetside cafes than they were to visit the mosques. Consumption was discouraged, and rumors linking the beverage with impotence, among other "ills," spread wildly. Still, there was no scarcity of coffee drinkers.
The Spread of Coffee
In fact, the Arabians guarded their beans with extreme jealousy. All coffee beans designated for export were boiled, destroying their ability to germinate and be domesticated outside the region. Although there is unofficial record that one religious pilgrim smuggled a seedling back to India in the early 1600s and planted it behind his hut in the Mysore area (where a great deal of good coffee has grown since), the commercial production of coffee remained under Arab control through the latter part of the century.
Not long after Venetian traders first presented coffee to Europe in 1615, Pope Clement VIII was warned it might prove threatening to the holy aims of the Church. A legislature of priests accused the beverage of being a tool for the devil, designed to lure good worshippers into losing their souls. Curious, the pope requested that his attendants bring a cup of the stuff to him. He found its aroma pleasing and, upon tasting it, became so enamored with the brew that he decided to get the better of the devil by baptizing it, thereby making coffee a "truly Christian beverage."
The ardently entrepreneurial Dutch orchestrated the first successful planting outside Arabia-on the island of Java-in 1699. An initial trial shipment was sent back to Amsterdam in 1706 and included one seedling, which was planted in the botanical gardens. This seedling measuring about five feet tall was successfully transplanted from the botanical gardens in Amsterdam to the gardens in Paris. Soon after, a young naval officer, Gabriel Mathieu de Clieu, triumphed as a coffee pioneer by bringing one of the plant's offspring to the Americas.
According to his own account, De Clieu shared his shipboard water ration with the plant, fended off jealous shipmates, and survived both storm and calm to finally triumph in planting the little tree when he docked at Martinique. Within 50 years, there were more than 18 million coffee trees growing on the island; these were the progenitors of most of the coffee plants growing in Central and South America today.
Coffee seeds (live unroasted beans still in their husks) were eventually transported or smuggled to all the places you might assume they were taken to: Indonesia, Central and South America, even back to other parts of Africa.
When coffee so gained in popularity in Germany that it replaced other breakfast beverages, the eighteenth-century ruler Frederick the Great issued a desperate manifesto. "It is disgusting to notice the increase in the quantity of coffee used by my subjects," he declared, complaining with particular bitterness that the revenues for coffee went to foreign hands while profit from beer came to the crown. "My people," he protested, "must drink beer." Johann Sebastian Bach's famous one-act operetta, the Coffee Cantata, was a thinly veiled operatic criticism of the extraordinary lengths the royalty and upper classes took to keep common folk from enjoying the beverage.
The fashionable populations of Vienna and London willingly blessed the beverage as well, although it was a Turkish ambassador's introduction of coffee to Paris that sparked a veritable explosion of coffee culture. It was rumored that Louis XV spent $15,000 per year on coffee for his daughters. Even the most avid coffee drinkers are astonished to hear that Voltaire supposedly consumed 50 cups a day. Balzac, another devotee among the French literati, applied its exciting properties thusly: He went to bed at six in the evening, slept until midnight, then rose for 12 solid hours of writing, during which time his sole sustenance was coffee.
At first, coffee was drunk mostly in ways that would taste either very odd or very awful to coffee drinkers today. Most brewing instructions published during the time of coffee's introduction to Europe instructed the reader to boil the grounds for varying lengths of time and then to heavily spice and sweeten the acrid potion. The coffee of Vienna (where coffee first appeared in Europe) was at first more confection than serious drink. It took a long time for people to figure out some of the most basic things about making a decent cup of plain old black coffee or even to determine that such a thing might actually be good. In Ethiopia and Yemen the coffee was (and still is) roasted very lightly, which heavily accentuates the coffee's fruitiness and acidity. At such a roast, the drink tastes more like mulled cider than anything most Westerners would label "coffee."
Despite the strange methods of preparation, coffee consumption continued to spread. It still does today, as coffee companies vie to introduce coffee to people and nations that have yet to wholeheartedly embrace the drink. These efforts may lead to coffee's supplanting tea as the world's second most popular drink (water being the first). How coffee will taste and how it will be roasted and brewed at that point in its history may be very different from what we know of coffee today.
Consumption of coffee in the United States began as early as 1668. The first documented license to sell coffee was obtained by Dorothy Jones of the Massachusetts Colony in 1670. It was the famous British tax on tea, however, that elevated the role of coffee forever. The British East India Tea Company harbored plans to develop a profitable market in the colonies. But the Boston Tea Party, plotted by revolutionaries in Boston's lively Green Dragon coffee house, made drinking coffee a popular form of protest against the iron fist of the monarchy. From that point forward, the more refined beverage of the British crown never regained a substantial foothold.
Today, the United States consumes more coffee than any other nation in the world. Although per capita intake peaked in the 1960s, our national average is again on the rise. Numbers indicate that the fuel behind this, and a parallel increase in Canada, is the emerging specialty coffee segment of the market. Clearly, an emphasis on better coffee is attracting consumers back to it.