There are several legendary accounts of the origin
of the coffee beverage, but the most popular one is attributed to
an Ethiopian goat herder called Kaldi.
One day in about 850AD he noticed his goats acting particularly
frisky after feeding on the ripe berries from a bush that was later
to be known as an arabica bush. He tried the berries himself and
had a similarly uplifting experience.
The local monks somehow heard about his story and soon started
eating the berries themselves - as a means to help them to stay
awake during long periods of prayer. They went on to find that, if
they were crushed and infused with water, the berries could produce
a (probably cold) drink that gave a similar stimulating effect. It
is presumed that the monks started sharing their knowledge of this
drink with other monasteries and so the collecting and use of
coffee berries grew throughout the region.
'magic' berries
Knowledge of these ‘magic’ berries was soon to spread across the
Bab-el-Mandeb straits (at the southern end of the Red Sea) to the
Middle Eastern country of Yemen on the Arabian Peninsula. It did
not take long for the Yemeni Arabs to start cultivating the coffee
plants and begin to use the berries for personal use and financial
gain.
It may well be that coffee became very popular in the area due to
restrictions of the Muslim religion, which forbids the consumption
of alcoholic beverages.
The uplifting properties of coffee, being not dissimilar to the
effects of moderate alcohol intake, made it an acceptable
substitute. No doubt this is the origin of the term ‘Wine of Araby’
or ‘Arabian Wine’ for the coffee drink.
Not until between 1000AD and 1200AD (probably in Arabia) was it
discovered that, by roasting and crushing the bean of the cherry,
and then infusing it with hot water, a delicious drink similar to
the coffee of today could be made.
coffee enters the vocabulary
The actual word "coffee" appears to have entered the English
language some 400 years ago from the Italian ‘caffe’. This word may
be derived from the Turkish ‘kahve’, which in turn came from the
Arabic ‘gahwa’ or ‘gahhwat al-bun’ meaning ‘wine of the
bean’.
The Ethiopian name for coffee is still ‘buna’. Alternatively the
name could have come from the Kingdom of Kaffa, which was a region
of Ethiopia at the time the coffee plant was first
discovered.
The names of the two most common types of coffee plant are coffea
arabica and coffea robusta (more correctly known as coffea
canefora), the former name meaning a coffee plant from Arabia and
the latter meaning a resilient or ‘robust’ coffee
plant.