The History of Coffee

The world’s second-most traded commodity has origins as fascinating and varied as the means of preparing them… from the Turkish invasion of the Holy Roman Empire to the  French Revolution, the history of coffee has emulated world history at many key junctures.

According to legend, an Ethiopian shepherd called Kaldi was the first to observe the influence of the caffeine in coffee beans when the goats appeared to ‘dance’ and to have an increased level of energy after consuming wild coffee berries. Another tale relates that it was a hungry, exiled sheik who chewed the berries, found them too bitter, cooked them over a fire and found them too hard and so boiled them in water, to discover a fragrant, refreshing brew… coffee does indeed have origins almost as fascinating and varied as the means of preparing them… Read the rest of this entry »