History of coffee
[3] Medieval Arab lexicographers traditionally held that the etymology of qahwah meant 'wine', given its distinctly dark color, and derived from the verb qahiya (قَهِيَ), 'to have no appetite'.
[4] There is no evidence that the word qahwah was named after the Ethiopian province of Kaffa (a part of where coffee originates from: Abyssinia),[4] or any significant authority stating the opposite, or that it is traced to the Arabic quwwa ("power").
[5][6] The Ottomans' dominant position in the trade in coffee is thought to have influenced several other European languages as well, inspiring "caffè" in Italian and "café" in French.
[7] Studies of genetic diversity have been performed on Coffea arabica varieties, which were found to be of low diversity but with retention of some residual heterozygosity from ancestral materials, and closely related diploid species Coffea canephora and C. liberica;[8] however, no direct evidence has ever been found indicating where in Africa coffee grew or who among the local people might have used it as a stimulant or known about it there earlier than the seventeenth century.
[15] However, these bans were to be overturned in 1524 by an order of the Ottoman Turkish Sultan Suleiman I, with Grand Mufti Mehmet Ebussuud el-İmadi issuing a fatwa allowing the consumption of coffee.
Neha Verami, from the Folger Shakespeare Library, said that "the history of these coffeehouses offers three connected insights: the emergence of the public sphere, the participation of larger sections of the population in the political lives of the early modern Islamic empires, and the hollowness of the allegations of despotism mounted on 'Oriental' societies by Western onlookers".
[28] Coffee houses located in areas such as Mecca were visited by those from all over: Muslims from mosques, those coming from afar to trade and sell, or simple travelers making their way through.
[29] In the past, the Oromo tribe in Ethiopia created foods from coffee plants such as bunna qela, made of butter, salt, and roasted beans.
[1] One account involves a 9th-century Ethiopian goatherder, Kaldi, who, noticing the energizing effects when his flock nibbled on the bright red berries of a certain bush, chewed on the fruit himself.
Since this story is not known to have appeared in writing before Rome-based Maronite Faustus Nairon's De Saluberrima potione Cahue seu Cafe nuncupata Discurscus in 1671, 800 years after it was supposed to have taken place, it is highly likely to be apocryphal.
According to the ancient chronicle (preserved in the Abd-Al-Kadir manuscript), Omar, who was known for his ability to cure the sick through prayer, was once banished from Mecca to a desert cave near the Ousab City.
[31] The word nepenthe first appears in the fourth book of Homer's Odyssey: ἔνθ᾽ αὖτ᾽ ἄλλ᾽ ἐνόησ᾽ Ἑλένη Διὸς ἐκγεγαυῖα: αὐτίκ᾽ ἄρ᾽ εἰς οἶνον βάλε φάρμακον, ἔνθεν ἔπινον, νηπενθές τ᾽ ἄχολόν τε, κακῶν ἐπίληθον ἁπάντων.
Straightway she cast into the wine of which they were drinking a drug to quiet all pain and strife, and bring forgetfulness of every ill. Figuratively, nepenthe means "that which chases away sorrow".
[34] In the Odyssey, νηπενθές φάρμακον : nēpenthés phármakon (i.e. an anti-sorrow drug) is a magical potion given to Helen by Polydamna, the wife of the noble Egyptian Thon,
Also, the German traveler Gustav Sommerfeldt in 1663 wrote "the ability and industriousness with which the Turkish prisoners earn some money, especially by preparing coffee, a powder resembling snuff tobacco, with water and sugar."
[38] The first mention of coffee in a European text is in Charles de l'Ecluse's Aromatum et simplicium aliquot medica-mentorum apud Indos nascientum historia from 1575.
Rather it be through the term 'coffee arabica' or the transportation of the drink, the passage of coffee into the Western world greatly resembles that of the scientific knowledge and discoveries passed on by the Islamicate Empires.
Scientists, artists, intellectuals, bon vivants and their financiers met in this special microcosm of the Viennese coffee houses of the Habsburg Empire.
World-famous personalities such as Gustav Klimt, Sigmund Freud, James Joyce and Egon Schiele were inspired in the Viennese coffee house.
Galland reported that he was informed by Mr. de la Croix, the interpreter of King Louis XIV of France, that coffee was brought to Paris by a certain Mr. Thevenot, who had travelled through the East.
Some date the Neapolitan discovery of coffee back to 1614, when the composer, explorer and musicologist Pietro Della Valle sent news from the Holy Land, in his letters to the dear friend, physician, poet, Greek scholar and Mario Schipano and his gathering of intellectuals, of a drink (called kahve)[60] the Arab Muslims brewed in hot pots.
The beans that van der Broecke acquired from Mocha forty years earlier adjusted well to conditions in the greenhouses at the Amsterdam Botanical Garden and produced numerous healthy Coffea arabica bushes.
However, cultivation did not gather momentum until independence in 1822,[2]: 19 leading to the clearing of massive tracts of the Atlantic Forest, first from the vicinity of Rio and later São Paulo for coffee plantations.
[2]: 20–24 In 1893, the coffee from Brazil was introduced into Kenya and Tanzania (Tanganyika), not far from its place of origin in Ethiopia, 600 years prior, ending its transcontinental journey.
Toward the end of the century the growth of franchises such as Caffe Bene and Starbucks brought about a greater demand for European-style coffee, and led to the decline of dabangs.
[93] Lipa is commonly attributed as being the center of this cultivation, until roughly 1889, when its industry abruptly failed, likely due to pests, coffee rust (which the Philippines had managed to avoid for longer than the rest of the world), and political factors.
[104] Clieux, when water rations dwindled during a difficult voyage, shared his portion with his precious plants and protected them from a Dutchman, perhaps an agent of the Provinces jealous of the Batavian trade.
The first coffee plantation in Brazil occurred in 1727 when Lt. Col. Francisco de Melo Palheta smuggled seeds, still essentially from the germ plasm originally taken from Yemen to Batavia,[106] from French Guiana.
Brazil, which like most other countries cultivates coffee as a commercial commodity, relied heavily on slave labor from Africa for the viability of the plantations until the abolition of slavery in 1888.
However, a policy of maintaining high prices soon opened opportunities to other nations, such as Venezuela, Colombia,[107] Guatemala, Nicaragua, Indonesia and Vietnam, now second only to Brazil as the major coffee producer in the world.
