ETHIOPIA IS THE BIRTHPLACE OF COFFEE…AND ALL HUMANKIND.

Becoming a real coffee nerd has meant that I’ve also become fascinated with coffee as an agricultural product, a retail platform, and a culturally-significant plant.

Here’s how I’ve got it. I’d love to learn more if you know more!

Coffee grew wildly in Ethiopia and other parts of East Africa like Sudan and Kenya. It was not cultivated and harvested there, but rather foraged like any other fruit or berry. It’s not difficult, really, to imagine how our genus (Homo) learned about cooking various foods. One walk across the savanna after a wildfire would have yielded smells and tastes that they learned to crave and ultimately control. Whether that’s the protein in cooked dead animal carcass meat (which was also suddenly disinfected by the fire and would no longer kill them) that helped us quickly grow our brains; or coffee seeds previously hidden in a bright fruit which gave us energy when we ate them, reduced pain in injuries, and made us more alert to enemies; or humans eating roasted frogs—some of which have psychedelic compounds in their glands which when ingested by humans stimulates neurogenesis and the development of language; hominids and our adbility to control fire is the birth of humanity…and of modern cooking. Had we not learned to harness fire, Homo Sapiens may have never happened.

From there, this lovely and magical plant was taken to Yemen in the late 1400’s where it was first cultivated as a crop. Somali merchants and Dutch mercenaries had been hired by the Ottoman Empire to take Ethiopian coffee plants to Yemen for cultivation. Sufi practitioners quickly embraced the stimulating effects of caffeine as an aid in concentration, prayer, and all night dancing vigils. Tightly regulated by their Ottoman rulers, coffee beans were forbidden to leave Yemen without first being roasted to prevent germination. The Dutch, however, found a way to get seeds or seedlings to Java for their own cultivation, and within a few generations it had spread throughout the Mediterranean and onward.

Like many of our stories as a species, slavery played a significant role in coffee’s spread around the globe. Muslim slaves had been imprisoned by early Catholic military guards in Malta, and those slaves used coffee to make their traditional beverage. That beverage found its way out of the prisons, and by the mid 1600’s coffee had found its way to Vienna, where the first “coffeehouse” was opened in 1683. They used materials taken from the conquered Turks, and began the practice of adding milk and sugar to coffee regularly

There’s so much more more to discover, and so many more stores of discovery to share. We’re grateful to be a part of your conversations

Cheers!