To the best of our knowledge, the origins of coffee began on the steep hillsides of the mountain highlands of Ethiopia. It was a hardy wild plant that bloomed beautiful white jasmine-scented flowers and produced an almost continuous supply of red bittersweet cherries, each of which contained not one, but two seeds called beans.

Although little outside of legend is known of coffee before the year 1000 AD, I would find it very hard to believe that it was unknown or unused before that time. To the best of our knowledge, the origins of mankind, the first proto humans, are thought to have lived and evolved in Africa, particularly in the region now known as Ethiopia. Many of archeology's great discoveries of the beginning of mankind descending out of the trees and becoming our bipedal and upright ancestors have been found in Ethiopia. The most famous of which, Lucy, was found November 24th, 1974 in the Afar depression at Hadar, Ethiopia.

Since then, there have been dozens of other discoveries in similar areas of Ethiopia, and they have pointed to a continuous habitation for over four million years. Now that is a very long time, and as evolutionary changes took place these small bipedal hominids eventually evolved into and became what we would call the “stone age man.” And these stone age, "Cavemen," became the ultimate hunter gatherers. That means they hunted when there was game available and they gathered from the earth anything else they could use or eat. And I mean anything. When your very survival, as a species, depends on being able to put food in your mouth and find shelter, you experiment and try every possible food source you can find. Over several million years, you can fit a lot of trial and error into determining what is good for you and what is not, as far as food is concerned. That means that the beautiful bittersweet cherries of the coffee plant were probably in those early trials. I guess if you saw birds or other animals eating certain plants or berries, it would be safe to assume that they are were not poisonous, and birds do eat ripe coffee cherries.

So, I'm going to make a giant leap to the conclusion that somewhere over the time span of four million years, our distant ancestors discovered the edible fruit of the coffee plant. We also know that these primitive yet adept hunter gatherers were experts at discovering the health or medicinal benefits of various plants, herbs, barks, leaves, and juices. So once again, I'm going to take another giant leap to the conclusion that the first caveman to munch down on those succulent red cherries wondered why in the middle of a long primordial night, he just couldn't get to sleep. Well, we all know the answer to that. Coffee contains caffeine, and caffeine is a very potent stimulant, especially for those who are not used to it or are ingesting it for the very first time.

And now, I'm going to conjecture a little more. I'll bet that once those hunter gatherers realized the effects of those red berries, they then became a much prized and sought-after medicinal supplement with a great number of uses. The primary ones being both an appetite suppressor and an all-powerful energy booster with the ability to keep you going as a hunter tracking game over long distances or to stay awake as a sentry through the long hours of the night protecting your clan from predators or enemies.

Mind you, I'm not talking about the use of coffee as we know it, roasted beans crushed and steeped in hot water, but as a source of various parts of the plant used or eaten, "As is," just picked off the plant. Roasted coffee didn't get discovered until several million years later.

I know that this is all hypotheses and my conjecture, but it is not improbable by any stretch, and it is in fact more probable, albeit unprovable, than not. Something so distinctive and so powerful could not have gone unnoticed, let alone unused when it was growing all around primitive mankind for millions of years.

It is a fact that the coffee plant, it's berries and seeds, were all well known to early shamans, medicine men, and healers of the middle to late first millennia, that is AD, 400 AD to 1000 AD. It was used as a source of medicinal food, such as a fermented beverage from the seeds or poultices and broths made from all its other edible parts.

But it wasn't until around the middle 800 ADs that some lucky Arab healer or perhaps a Bedouin trader roasted the first coffee beans, probably by accident, like so many other great discoveries. I will conjecture once more again that after the beans first cracked, (they pop and split almost like popcorn) that same Arab was so enticed by the wondrous aroma of roasting coffee that he thought, "If it smells this good, it must taste good too." And he popped a couple of roasted beans into his mouth just to see. I don't know if you know it or not, but you can chew and eat roasted coffee beans. They are not that hard after roasting and you can crunch them up easily with your teeth. And guess what? they taste just like coffee as we know it.

Well, it's not a big stretch, again, to imagine that perhaps that same Bedouin trader decided to grind some up on a rock and steeped the grounds in hot water, just like they did with so many other plants, creating poultices or broths and then, abracadabra, coffee the beverage was born and it hit the ground running and hasn't stopped since.

It wasn't long after that discovery that this delicious beverage became such a high demand commodity that the native and wild coffee plant of the remote Ethiopian highlands was transplanted (literally) to Yemen where it could be grown in quantities and in areas much easier accessible to growers and sellers. Boom! The birth of the commercial coffee industry. This now agriculturally grown crop would soon be needed to feed in mass the new consumers of roasted, ground and brewed coffee.

We think that the Ethiopian wild coffee plants were domesticated between 500 AD and 850 AD. And though they may have at first been used for medicinal purposes, it was soon discovered that roasted ground and brewed coffee was a true earthly delight, and it quickly spread throughout the entire Arab world.

There was a popular mid-eastern story that tells of how roasted coffee first came to be. Is it true? We don't know. But it is certainly not out of the realm of possibility, and it's a good story.

Here’s one version of the legend that I like. The story goes that sometime around the year 1250 A.D. there was a dervish named Hadji Omar. He was driven from his home in Mocha into the desert by his enemies where they expected him to die of starvation. This would surely have happened if he had not chanced upon some bushes bearing some cherry like berries that he tasted out of desperation. Being too bitter for his taste he decided to roast them in order to improve the taste, but they became to hard to eat. So, decided to boil them to soften them up but to no avail, however he drank the resulting brown colored water thinking that it might give him some nourishment. He found that it revitalized him, gave him energy and assuaged his growing depression. He later returned to Mocha and his survival was considered a miracle. The drink he credited his “miracle” to was coffee and it sprang into high favor and much demand as a result. It was so revered and powerful that Hadji Omar was made a saint.

Coffee became so popular that wherever Arab or Muslim domination was asserted coffee was also. During the 1400s Ottoman Turks became the most powerful and successful regime in the Middle East, and conquered and held dominion over most of the Arab world. In addition to being some of the world's most fearsome warriors, they were rabid coffee drinkers. After conquering the last Christian bastion of the eastern world, the remaining remnant of the Roman Byzantine Empire, Constantinople, in 1453 the Ottomans renamed the city Istanbul and opened the first coffee house there within months of its new ownership, somewhere around 1454 AD.

Since Constantinople was an extremely important historical trading port Istanbul quickly took over that vital role. When looking from Europe, Istanbul is regarded as the doorway to the east, and almost all goods from as far away as India and even China passed through the port of Istanbul and that of course included coffee.

Coffee became such an integral part of Arab society that men would congregate daily at the many coffee houses to discuss everything, including politics and religion. Seen as dens of subversion and a threat by Muslim rulers of that time, coffee houses were banned in Mecca in 1511, and in Cairo in 1532. However, so great was the public outcry in protest that both governments eventually relented to lift those bans. It would seem that the danger from banning the coffee houses posed a much greater threat than just letting them be.

It was a Dutch trader who brought the first coffee back from Istanbul in the early 1600s and was the first to introduce coffee to Europe. Coffee worked its wonderful magic once again and coffee houses were soon springing up across Europe like the spread of an unchecked wildfire. The first coffee house we know of was in Venice, Italy in 1645, the first in London in 1652, and the first in Paris in 1685. All across Europe, coffee consumption grew to the point where certain regions, countries, and even cities developed their own styles, tastes, and roasts. The best known, of course, being the dark espresso blends of Italy.

As this was also the age of exploration, the new world found its doors opened up to the exploration and subsequent colonization by vying and competing European powers. Of course, coffee came along for the ride. And legend has it that all the coffee introduced into the new world owes its lineage to a single cutting brought by a Dutch trader from the Netherlands to the French island colony of Martinique in 1720. And in the southern lands and islands of this new world, coffee took root and flourished. Soon coffee production in the Central Americas and South America supplied over half the production of the entire world's coffee supply, and with the coming independence of the newly forming United States of America, the coffee farmers of Latin and South America would soon find an ever growing demand fueled by the arrival of all the settlers who spread across the “New World”, that is, the North American continent.

A Brief History of Coffee