History of coffee and coffee legends

Few drinks carry as much history in a single cup as coffee.

ts journey from a wild Ethiopian shrub to the world's favourite morning ritual is a tale of legend, smuggling, royal greenhouses, and a spread that circled the entire globe.

Beer is probably the oldest drink humans have made, its recipes reaching back thousands of years, and winemaking is nearly as old, dating back some eight thousand years. Coffee is the younger cousin by far. The plant itself is ancient, but the drink we know took shape only a few hundred years ago — and once it did, it travelled with remarkable speed.

A brief history of coffee

No one knows quite how old the coffee plant is. There is archaeological suggestion that people in East Africa were eating its berries a very long time ago, chewing the fruit or mixing it with fat long before anyone thought to brew it.

One much-loved legend credits the discovery to a goat herder in the Ethiopian highlands. Noticing that his goats grew lively and sleepless after eating the bright red berries of a certain shrub, he tried them himself and felt the same lift. Whether or not a herder named Kaldi ever existed, the story captures something true: coffee's effect was noticed early, and people wanted more of it.

From Ethiopia, coffee crossed the Red Sea to Yemen, on the southern tip of the Arabian peninsula, and it was here that it became a drink rather than a food. Sufi monks brewed it to stay awake through long night prayers, and by the 15th century coffee was well established in the port city of Mocha — a name still attached to coffee today. Arabia guarded its new treasure jealously: exporting beans that could germinate was forbidden, and for a long time the Arab world controlled the trade.

One story tells of an Indian pilgrim, Baba Budan, who defied that ban in the 1600s by smuggling seven precious beans out of Arabia strapped to his body, then planting them in the hills of Chikmagalur in southern India. Myth or not, coffee took root there, and the region remains central to India's sizeable coffee output today.

European traders — Dutch, British, and French — carried the beans further as they travelled. The Dutch introduced coffee to their colony of Java by the late 17th century, giving the world yet another word that still means coffee. From those plantations came a single prized coffee plant, presented as a gift to the king of France.

Louis XIV so savoured his coffee that, finding the tree would not tolerate frost, he had a greenhouse built to keep it alive and supply his cup. From that single royal plant, so the story goes, descended much of the coffee later grown across Central and South America.

Around 1720 a French naval officer carried a seedling from that stock across the Atlantic to the Caribbean island of Martinique, nursing it through the voyage — legend says he shared his own drinking-water ration with it when the ship was becalmed. It thrived in the tropical heat, and from its thousands of descendants coffee spread to Mexico, where it is now a major export.

Coffee reached Brazil by a bolder route still. Sent to French Guiana to obtain seeds the French were careful to guard, a Brazilian officer named Francisco de Melo Palheta is said to have charmed the governor's wife instead. As he departed, she handed him a farewell bouquet with the forbidden beans tucked inside. Brazil is now one of the largest coffee producers on earth.

From Brazil the beans eventually completed their circle, carried in the late 19th century to Kenya and Tanzania — a short distance from coffee's original Ethiopian home. Six centuries to travel the world and find its way back: reason enough, perhaps, to sit down with a cup.

Coffee legends and reality

That a simple beverage could inspire so many romantic tales — and so much hard-headed business — is a wonder in itself. Legends aside, the more reliable histories place coffee's origins in Ethiopia and its rise as a drink in Yemen, from where it spread across Arabia and then, from the Renaissance onward, to Europe, Asia, the Americas, and eventually every corner of the globe and every social class.

For as long as people have drunk coffee, they have argued about whether it is good for them, and the claims have run from the miraculous to the alarming. The truth, as usual, sits somewhere in between. Modern research is more measured than the old cure-all tales: large long-term studies have linked moderate coffee drinking to a lower risk of type 2 diabetes, and there is evidence of benefit for liver health. Like wine, coffee is rich in antioxidants, though researchers still debate how much that matters. On the other side, caffeine can disturb sleep, and cutting it out abruptly can bring on headaches and irritability for a day or two. As with most pleasures, moderation seems to be the sensible course.

Coffee today

Coffee is one of the world's great crops, supporting the livelihoods of an estimated 25 million farming families. It is often said to be the second most traded commodity after oil — a striking claim that turns out to be a myth. It may have been roughly true in the 1960s and 1970s, but grains and metals long ago overtook it, and coffee no longer ranks anywhere near the top by value or volume. Even so, the scale is staggering: more than two billion cups of coffee are drunk around the world every single day.

The modern coffee shop is a global fixture. Starbucks alone now runs more than 40,000 stores across some 80 countries — a long way from the single shop that opened in Seattle in 1971.

At home, too, good coffee has never been easier. The first espresso machine was patented in Italy in 1901, and the technology was refined into the rich, crema-topped shot we know by the middle of the century. Today a home machine can pull a straight shot or a double at the touch of a button, and turn it into a cappuccino, latte, or mocha with a little steamed milk. Flavoured coffees, in as much variety as wine — vanilla, caramel, hazelnut, and more — are a matter of a single splash.

With all that history, money, and delicious variety in a single cup, perhaps the old legends were not so far from the truth after all.