12:57 History of Coffee | |
 The popular theory is that coffee was really ‘discovered’ by a sheep herder from Caffa Ethiopia. The herder was known as Kaldi, and he happened to notice that his sheep would get hyperactive after eating red "cherries” from the plant we now know to be coffee. Intrigued as to what the plant was doing to his flock, Kaldi tried a couple himself, and was soon in a caffeine frenzy. Initially, the local monks scolded Kaldi for his new found drug, but they soon found that if they took some coffee themselves, the monks could stay up later for their prayers- or so the story goes. Originally the coffee plant grew naturally in Ethopia, where the coffee bean would be wrapped in animal fat by the locals and used as sustenance on long hunting and raiding expeditions over a thousand years ago. It was the Arabians that took the plant away, farmed it heavily, and began the first coffee monopoly. In 1453, the Turks were the first people to actually make a drink out of coffee beans, and the world’s first coffee shop, Kiva Han, opened there 22 years later. At the same time, Turkish law made it legal to divorce a man if he fails to provide his wife with enough coffee to last her the day. In 1511, the governor of Mecca, Khair Beg, tried to ban coffee because he saw that its influence might encourage the emergence of an opposition to his government. Beg wasn’t a smart man, because the Sultan of Arabia considered coffee to be sacred, and duly had the Governor killed. In Arabia at the time, coffee plants were guarded like we guard nuclear plants today. The idea was to keep coffee in Arabia, but it was a theory that worked better in concept than practice. Just as with any other delicacy, when you tell people they can’t have it, they find a way to have it anyway, and so a man by the name of Baba Budan smuggled the precious beans to the region of Mysore, India, and began farming coffee. To this day, the offshoots of those original plants are still farmed in Mysore. | |
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