How a roasted bean created the drink of choice for the world
Not every hero wears a cape—some carry a shepherd’s staff, herd goats, and change the course of human history with a casual attitude towards eating unfamiliar berries.
A popular legend says that about a thousand years ago, an Abyssinian goatherder named Kaldi noticed his typically stoic goats were excitingly hopping and frolicking around like a Habesha on his wedding day. Not wanting to be left out of the goat party, he investigated the situation and found the goats munching away on the berries and leaves of an unfamiliar tree.
The pressing weight of peer pressure from all the cool goats was simply too much to handle and Kaldi tried a handful of the magic berries for himself. Minutes later he had fashioned some twigs, grass, and fireflies into primitive glowsticks and joined the dancing goats in what is said to be the first documented rave.
A passing monk saw Kaldi’s goat party and asked the obvious question, “Heeeey buddy, whatcha doin’?” Kaldi turned the monk onto the berries, who took advantage of their stimulating properties to pray all night without falling asleep. This prompted some of the monks to think the berries were of the Devil and they hurled them into the fire.
The aroma of the roasting berries proved to be irresistible so they were rescued from the fire, crushed to put out the embers, and placed into a jug of hot water in an effort to preserve them. Later, the monks succumbed to temptation, rethought their stance on devil berries, and drank the brew to help keep them from falling asleep during nightly devotions. Simultaneously, “Coffee: The Beverage” and “The Legend of Kaldi: Bringer of Coffee” were born.
The Spread of Coffee
Coffee is the second most valuable, legally traded commodity in the world—just behind oil and internet cat videos. About 2.25 billion cups of coffee are consumed each day worldwide and millions depend on coffee’s restorative and energizing powers to sustain them through the day and prevent them from brutally murdering family members and friends before 8 a.m.
Just like any food that has been around for centuries, coffee’s history is peppered with controversy and global intrigue. Before it became the holiest of morning elixirs, coffee was consumed in a number of less comforting ways. Coffee plants produce a cherry-like fruit with the coffee bean nestled in the center of that fruit. By 1000 AD, Ethiopians were mixing the fruit with animal fat to create a protein rich snack only slightly more disgusting than a Clif Bar that’s been lingering in the bottom of a gym bag for six months.
During this same period, they began to sell coffee beans to Islamic traders who brought them to the Arabian Peninsula and India, where they were made into a beverage. Muslims weren’t supposed to drink wine or beer, so coffee became a popular drink to serve guests instead, kind of like Baptists.
By the mid 1400s, the Ottomans had figured out that roasting the beans before grinding and brewing them into a drink helped make the flavor more soothing and less like drinking liquid meth. By the 1500s, Ottoman traders had introduced this new coffee-drinking fad to Italian ports where Europeans fell in love with it, especially when mixed with their other newfound fad—sugar.
Europe isn’t warm enough to grow coffee or sugar, so colonists from the Holy Roman Empire strapped on their thinking arbalests and solved this problem in that special way colonial empires do—by bringing plants to the Americas and the Caribbean and utilizing enslaved West Africans to grow coffee and sugar to feed their insatiable thirst.
Coffee plants eventually made it to the New World during the early 1700s, but didn’t really catch on until the Boston Tea Party in 1773, when switching from tea to coffee became an easy way to measure one’s patriotism, similar to the number of flag pins and Toby Keith CDs a person owns today.
The Rise of the Coffeehouse
While it was common for coffee to be drunk in the home, by the 1500s public coffee houses had become popular places to socialize in villages and cities across the Middle East and east Africa. The coffee house was where you went if you wanted to know what was happening, where it was happening, and who was involved.
Soon they earned the nickname ‘schools of the wise’ which naturally drew the attention of paranoid tyrants, kings, and religious leaders who saw coffee and these dens of unfiltered knowledge as a threat to their authority. On cue, coffee bans popped up everywhere a threat from this dark elixir was suspected.
In 1511, for example, the governor of Mecca banned coffee drinking because he was afraid it would bring men together and give them the opportunity to discuss his failings. In the 16th century, Italian Catholic clergy claimed coffee to be Satanic and pressed for its prohibition until Pope Clement VIII tried the devil’s brew for himself and declared it safe for both body and soul.
About that same time, penalties in the Ottoman Empire for drinking jitter juice included being sewn into a leather bag and thrown into the waters of the Bosporus and by the mid 1700s Sweden had banned coffee and everything associated with it, including cups and dishes.
Never willing to fall behind in prohibiting things that taste good, British attempts to proscribe the intake of enthusiasm juice hinged on reasons more prurient than political. The 1674 Women’s Petition Against Coffee stated that coffee “made men as unfruitful as the deserts whence that unhappy berry is said to be brought”, blaming their husband’s erectile dysfunction on the “noxious puddle” of coffee.
Men, of course, did not take these claims lying down and protested, saying that “base adulterate wine” and “muddy ale” were the cause of men’s impotence. Coffee, they believed, was Viagra in a cup, sent by God to make their “erection more vigorous, ejaculation more full, adding a spiritual ascendency to the sperm,” because nothing says sexy-time quite like spiritually ascendant sperm.
In spite of these varied and sometimes entertaining attempts at banning the black ichor of life, coffee houses continued as places for intellectuals, revolutionaries, and dissidents to get hopped up on cupped lightning and discuss political and social upheaval. Many eventually became targets, but profit outpaced persecution and coffee continued its march towards beverage dominance.
Second Wave Coffee
It wasn’t long before technology and innovation responded to consumer demand for coffee that was affordable and convenient. Folgers and Maxwell House became household names, Hills Bros. Coffee introduced vacuum packaging, and coffee became the drink of choice for the modern man, woman and sneaky child.
Convenience and availability, however, came at a cost to taste and quality which created a backlash in the ‘80s with micro-roasters cropping up like poppies to fulfill coffee drinker’s desire to have a better quality beverage, know the origin of the beans and how they were roasted.
Coffee drinking quickly became commercialized and now there’s a gourmet coffee shop on every corner, stocked and ready to whip up a triple Krakatoa mocha chiata with a sprinkling of dehydrated rhino beetle dust—venti.
The Future of the Holy Bean
But all is not well for those who dedicate their mornings to the Goddess Caffeina. As we sip our Poison Dart Frog Mochas and read the daily headlines, climate change can seem like a distant threat. But for those who live, work and survive off of your desire for a morning Low-cal Frappa-Creme-de-Menthol, the issue is far too real.
Coffee farmers in Chiapas, Mexico, for example, are seeing temperatures wildly fluctuating between cold that stunts growth and heat that dries the berries before they can be harvested. Coffee farmers across South America, Asia and Africa are experiencing increased droughts, downpours, and plagues of crop-devouring pests as a result of global warming.
So why not just grow it somewhere else? The refined qualities we love about Arabica coffee (which accounts for about 70 percent of coffee sold worldwide) make it is far more sensitive to stress than its more bitter and less palatable cousin Robusta. Commercial Arabica has very little genetic diversity, making it delicate and particularly vulnerable to the new and unpredictable conditions resulting from climate change.
Will Arabica disappear? It’s unlikely, but the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) released a report late last year that predicted the fragrance, aroma, aftertaste, body and sweetness of Arabica will all suffer due to encroaching climate change.
Some farmers are looking for ways to adapt. Some will graft Arabica onto Robusta rootstock or simply shift completely to Robusta. Where farmers are expecting fewer changes due to climate change, shade crops will be introduced to help minimize the impact of the heat and better irrigation systems can be used to combat unpredictable rains.
It’s unlikely these adaptations will make up for the loss of flavor and aroma that is coming to Arabica, but at least it’s some consolation.
For now, drink up. We are likely living in a moment of singularity—a moment in time when you can get virtually any type of coffee, at any time of day. Live the dream so we can tell our grandkids about the wonders of Arabica, our hero Kaldi’s goats and those delicious, magical berries.