The Origins Of Coffee

The History Of Coffee

Coffee is everywhere nowadays. Spread by its success as a legal stimulant and by the aggressive marketing of companies like Starbucks, it is pretty hard to find anywhere in the world that doesn’t have ready access to coffee of some sort. But coffee means different things to different people, cultures and places. And despite being everywhere, its origins are mysterious.

The Origin Of Coffee

About all that is certain is that coffee was first discovered by humans on the shores of the Red Sea. Some would say on the Arabic Peninsula, others in Ethiopia. Here are some of the various tales told of its origin.

There are two stories that link the discovery of coffee with goats. These two stories, remarkable in their similarity, come from the two competing coffee origin areas – Ethiopia and Yemen. The Yemenese tale credits a sufi mystic, Sheikh ash-Shadhili. As the tale tells, he noticed goats bounding and prancing about with great vitality. They had been grazing on a bush with red berries, so he tried them, and experienced the same vitality himself. [Note that versions of the tale have him doing this in Ethiopia, which does lend credence to the claim of origin.] The competing tale is of the Ethiopian goatherder, Kaldi, who reportedly did much the same thing but the goats are described as dancing. The timeframe for these tales is reportedly around 800AD.

It is of course, quite possible that discovery and cultivation began much earlier  -  there are mentions of a dark and bitter drink as a stimulant in early Arabic writings and even in the works of Homer (all from well over a thousand years earlier than the official first records). But there is no eveidence beyond vague mentions to back these theories up.

Ethiopian origins do gain some credence when it is considered that one of the ancient kingdoms of Ethiopie was called Kaffe.

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