Since the Boston Tea Party, Americans have been crazy for coffee, choosing it as their caffeine fix. But obviously that’s not the origin of java. Naturally, the history of coffee goes back much earlier.
A video clip that goes back to the very initial cup of coffee prepared and sipped, and afterwards it tracks the expansion of coffee around the world. All of us heard the Ethiopian legend which says the goat herder Kaldi found the power of the coffee beans. But what happened afterwards?
So get out your Chemex, grind some beans, boil some water, and sit down to watch this history of coffee with a cup of your own.
Full story - cool facts about coffee
According to the legend, the energizing effects of the coffee bean were first found by a goat herder called Kaldi, who lived on the Ethiopian plateau back throughout the 9th century.
Kaldi saw that after some of his heard had grazed on the bright red cherry of the coffee plant they appeared to have boundless energy, certainly more than the remainder of his animals. As the story goes, this left them also invigorated to fall asleep during the night, as their packages of energy had them bounding everywhere.
A brief background
After Kaldi noticed how " alert" his goats became after consuming the coffee berries, he ran to the local monastery to let the monks know. A monk produced a mixture from the berries and managed to stay up much later praying.News of this new mixture spread into Egypt and right into the Arabian peninsula, where coffee traveled east and west, finally getting in southeast Asia and the Americas. And it's been preferred ever since.
However if we are to consider facts only, and not tales, the earliest substantiated evidence of either coffee drinking or knowledge of the coffee tree is from the early 15th century, in the Sufi monasteries of Yemen, spreading quickly to Mecca and Medina. By the 16th century, it had actually reached the rest of the Middle East, South India (Karnataka), Persia, Turkey, the Horn of Africa, and north Africa. Coffee after that spread to the Balkans, Italy, and to the rest of Europe, along with Southeast Asia and despite the restrictions imposed during the 15th century by religious leaders in Capital and Cairo, and later by the Catholic Church.
Etymology
It turns out the term "coffee" originate from Arabic. The word entered the English language in 1582 via the Dutch koffie, borrowed from the Ottoman Turkish kahve, consequently borrowed from the Arabic qahwah.There is an even more intriguing theory of the origin of the word, which you can read on Wikipedia here.
Modern Coffee Background
The modern times race for convenience and efficiency realized that individuals are "wasting" too much time making coffee. This is how instant coffee was invented. David Strang, a New Zealander invented it in 1889. Freeze-dried coffee was developed in 1938.Decaffeinated coffee was developed by Ludwig Roselius in 1903, filling a demand for people who are hypersensitive to caffeine.
The coffee filter, the basis of the most preferred coffee developing technique, the drip coffee, was invented by Melitta Bentz in 1908.
Achille Gaggia created the modern-day espresso device in 1946. The first pump-driven espresso maker was made in 1960.
Today coffee is still one of the world's most in demand beverages. Brazil is still the globe's largest producer of coffee.