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.