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 made and sipped, and after that it tracks the spread of coffee around the globe. We all heard the Ethiopian legend which claims the goat herdsman Kaldi uncovered the potential of the coffee beans. However 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 - coffee history
According to the tale, the invigorating effects of the coffee bean were first discovered by a goat herdsman called Kaldi, that lived on the Ethiopian plateau back during the 9th century.
Kaldi noticed that after some of his heard had foraged on the cherry of the coffee plant they seemed to have limitless energy, absolutely more than the remainder of his animals. As the story goes, this left them too stimulated to fall asleep in the evening, as their bundles of energy had them bounding all over the place.
A brief background
After Kaldi saw how " alert" his goats became after consuming the coffee berries, he went to the local monastery to let the monks know. A monk created a mixture from the berries and managed to stay up much later praying.News of this brand-new mixture spread into Egypt and right into the Arabian peninsula, where coffee traveled east and west, lastly landing in southeast Asia and the Americas. And it's been popular ever since.
However if we are to follow facts only, and not tales, the oldest confirmed proof of either coffee drinking or knowledge of the coffee tree is from the early 15th century, in the Sufi abbeys of Yemen, spreading out soon to Mecca and Medina. By the 16th century, it had actually gotten to the rest of the Middle East, South India (Karnataka), Persia, Turkey, the Horn of Africa, and northern Africa. Coffee then spread to the Balkans, Italy, and to the rest of Europe, along with Southeast Asia and regardless of the bans imposed throughout 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 got in the English language in 1582 via the Dutch koffie, borrowed from the Turkish kahve, in turn borrowed from the Arabic qahwah.There is an even more interesting theory of the origin of the word, which you can read on Wikipedia here.
Modern Coffee Background
The modern times race for comfort and performance understood that people are "losing" too much time brewing coffee. This is how instant coffee was developed. David Strang, a New Zealander developed it in 1889. Freeze-dried coffee was developed in 1938.Decaffeinated coffee was developed by Ludwig Roselius in 1903, filling a requirement for people that are hypersensitive to high levels of caffeine.
The coffee filter, the base of one of the most preferred coffee developing method, the drip coffee, was created by Melitta Bentz in 1908.
Achille Gaggia created the contemporary coffee device in 1946. The first pump-driven espresso maker was made in 1960.
Today coffee is still one of the world's most preferred drinks. Brazil is still the globe's largest producer of coffee.