History of Coffee

Coffee is grown in many countries around the world but their heritage originates from the trees in the ancient coffee forests in Ethiopia. Within 100 years of its discovery, coffee established itself as a commodity crop throughout the world.

This actual complete history of coffee has a few gaps in that there is no real evidence, to show exactly when, or how, coffee was first discovered but a popular story is that coffee was discovered by a sheep herder from Ethiopia approximately in the 8th century. He was known as Kaldi and what happened is he began to notice that his sheep would get hyperactive after eating the reddish berries from the coffee plant. Fascinated as to why this was happening he tried a couple himself, and soon experienced the first caffeine rush.

The coffee plant grew naturally in Ethiopia but the first coffee trees were cultivated on the Arabian peninsula. Coffee was first roasted and boiled by the Arabs who called it qahwa (which literally means "that which prevents sleep") thus Arabs were the first to cultivate coffee.

It wasn't until the 14th century when the Turks became the first people to actually make a drink out of coffee beans, and the world’s first coffee shop, coffee was hardly known in Europe before the seventeenth century with the first coffeehouse opening in Italy in 1654.