The History Of Coffee - Video

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 first cup of coffee made and drunk, and then it tracks the expansion of coffee worldwide. All of us read the Ethiopian legend which says the goat herder Kaldi found the power of the coffee beans. But 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 - the history of coffee

According to the legend, the invigorating effects of the coffee bean were first discovered by a goat herdsman called Kaldi, who lived on the Ethiopian plateau way back during the 9th century.

One day Kaldi discovered that after some of his heard had foraged on the cherry of the coffee plant they appeared to possess boundless power, certainly more than the rest of his animals. As the tale goes, this left them too stimulated to go to sleep during the night, as their bundles of power had them bounding everywhere.

A brief history

After Kaldi discovered how " playful" his goats became after eating the coffee berries, he ran to the regional monastery to let the monks know. A monk produced a brew from the berries and was able to stay up much later praying.

News of this brand-new brew spread into Egypt and right into the Arabian peninsula, where coffee traveled east and west, finally getting in southeast Asia and the Americas. And it's been prominent since.

However if we are to follow facts only, and not legends, the earliest validated 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 quickly to Mecca and Medina. By the 16th century, it had reached the remainder of the Middle East, South India (Karnataka), Persia, Turkey, the Horn of Africa, and north Africa. Coffee then infected the Balkans, Italy, and to the rest of Europe, as well as Southeast Asia and regardless of the restrictions imposed throughout the 15th century by religious leaders in Capital and Cairo, and later on 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, consequently borrowed from the Arabic qahwah.

There is an even more intriguing theory of the origin of the word, which you can read on Wikipedia here.

Modern Coffee Background

The modern times race for comfort and productivity understood that people are "wasting" too much time preparing coffee. This is how instant coffee was developed. David Strang, a New Zealander invented it in 1889. Freeze-dried coffee was developed in 1938.

Decaffeinated coffee was invented by Ludwig Roselius in 1903, filling a demand for people who are sensitive to high levels of caffeine.

The coffee filter, the basis of one of the most popular coffee developing method, the drip coffee, was created by Melitta Bentz in 1908.

Achille Gaggia created the modern coffee device in 1946. The very first pump-driven coffee machine was made in 1960.

Today coffee is still among the world's most common beverages. Brazil is still the world's biggest producer of coffee.