Origins · 4 min read
The Origin of Coffee: A Legendary Tale
Discover the legendary origins of coffee, from the Ethiopian highlands to the global phenomenon it is today.
Every coffee story eventually leads back to the forests of southwestern Ethiopia, where Coffea arabica still grows wild beneath the canopy. The well-known legend of Kaldi, the goat herder who noticed his flock dancing after eating red cherries, is probably apocryphal. The genetic record is not: Ethiopia holds more Arabica diversity than the rest of the world combined.
Traders carried the seed across the Red Sea to Yemen, where the first cultivated coffee and the first coffeehouses appeared in the fifteenth century. From the port of Mocha, coffee travelled to Istanbul, Venice and Amsterdam. Within three centuries it was growing in Java, the Caribbean and Brazil.
Today the descendants of those forest trees, known simply as "heirloom", give Yirgacheffe its floral, citrus-bright character. When you brew a washed Ethiopian, you taste something close to the beginning of the story.
“Ethiopia holds more Arabica diversity than the rest of the world combined.”
