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 that goes back to the very initial cup of coffee prepared and drunk, and then it traces the expansion of coffee around the world. Most of us heard the Ethiopian legend which says the goat herder Kaldi uncovered the potential of the coffee beans. However what happened after that?
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 - more coffee facts
According to the tale, the energizing effects of the coffee bean were first uncovered by a goat herder called Kaldi, that lived on the Ethiopian plateau way back throughout the 9th century.
One day Kaldi observed that after some of his heard had foraged on the cherry of the coffee plant they seemed to have limitless energy, definitely more than the remainder of his animals. As the story goes, this left them too energized to go to sleep during the night, as their bundles of power had them bounding everywhere.
A quick history
After Kaldi discovered how " playful" his goats became after consuming the coffee berries, he went to the regional monastery to let the monks know. A monk developed a brew from the berries and managed to keep up a lot later praying.News of this brand-new brew spread into Egypt and into the Arabian peninsula, where coffee traveled east and west, ultimately ending up in southeast Asia and the Americas. And it's been popular since.
However if we are to consider facts only, and not legends, the earliest validated 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 northern Africa. Coffee after that infected the Balkans, Italy, and to the rest of Europe, along with Southeast Asia and despite the bans imposed during the 15th century by spiritual leaders in Mecca and Cairo, and later on by the Catholic Church.
Etymology
It turns out the term "coffee" originate from Arabic. The word went into the English language in 1582 via the Dutch koffie, borrowed from the Turkish kahve, subsequently borrowed from the Arabic qahwah.There is an even more intriguing hypothesis of the beginning of the word, which you can read on Wikipedia here.
Modern Coffee History
The modern times race for comfort and performance realized that people are "losing" too much time preparing coffee. This is how instant coffee was invented. David Strang, a New Zealander invented it in 1889. Freeze-dried coffee was invented in 1938.Decaffeinated coffee was created by Ludwig Roselius in 1903, filling a need for people who are sensitive to high levels of caffeine.
The coffee filter, the base of the most prominent coffee developing approach, the drip coffee, was created by Melitta Bentz in 1908.
Achille Gaggia created the contemporary coffee maker in 1946. The initial pump-driven coffee maker was made in 1960.
Today coffee is still one of the world's most preferred beverages. Brazil is still the world's largest producer of coffee.