Rich History of Coffee Discovery
Second only to oil, coffee is the most sought after legally exchanged commodity in the world. We love it, we crave it, and we drink it in enormous quantities. It is estimated that 2.25 billion cups of coffee are consumed each day worldwide. New Yorkers are said to consume seven times the amount of any other U.S. city, which is why it may seem like there is a Starbucks on every edge of Manhattan. Famed French writer and philosopher Voltaire was believed to have drank 40 – 50 cups per day.
Coffee is a daily #commodity in the lives of millions of people around the globe. Where exactly did this caffeinated delicacy begin?
As with some other foods that have lingered for centuries, coffee’s beginnings are developed in mystery and lore. There folklore Ethiopian legend that coffee was discovered by a goat herder named Kaldi, who discovered his goats frolicking and full of life after eating the red fruit of the coffee bush. Kaldi sampled the fruit for himself and had a similar energy. After seeing their odd behavior, a monk took some of the fruit back to other monks; they all stayed awake and alert all night. From then, they would have been reacting to coffee’s spurge of caffeine. This stimulant from nature also serves as an inborn plant pesticide, protecting the coffee bean fruit from pest that ate on the bean fruit.
According to a folklore wrote down in 1671, coffee was first found by the 9th-century Ethiopian goat-herder Kaldi.
The history of coffee goes back to centuries of old oral folklore in present day Ethiopia, though neither where coffee was first cultivated nor direct evidence of its consumption previous to the 15th century have been discovered. Sufi monasteries in Yemen decided to use coffee as an aid to concentration during meditational prayers.