For most of the people coffee is an everyday tool to start the day, to begin or end the breakfast with it, and to make the working hours more bearable. But we do not really know a lot about this precious drink we just consume day by day.
Legends say that the coffee beans were discovered in Ethiopia, thanks to a person, named Kaldi who was a goat herder. He realised that his goats started to act strange when they were eating from a specific tree. They were so energetic, they could not fall asleep. With the help of a monk, Kaldi made a drink from these berries – we know this as coffee today-, and that is how the mindblowing journey of coffee just went across the globe. By the 15th century, coffee was not only enjoyed at homes, but also in many public coffee houses, and made its way to Yemen from Ethiopia. But do you know where the word „mocha” comes from? This is the port, Mocha, at which the beans first arrived to Yemen.
The beans became popular in Egypt, Persia and Turkey. European travelers brought back a story of an unknown, delicious black drink to Europe, so not many years were needed to build the first coffee houses in Europe as well. Coffee was brought to the contintent of America in the mid 1600’s, more precisely to New York (previously called New Amsterdam). Altough during those ages tea was the favourite drink of the New World, after the Boston Tea Party, everything has changed, and coffee became the number one.
But if Brazil is one of the world’s largest coffee empire, do we know anything about how these little black beans reached the country? A young naval officer, Gabriel de Clieu, by the order of King Louis XIV, obtained a seedling from the king’s plants. Although he had a challenging journey to Brazil, he managed to reach Martinique, and he planted the little seedling, making the base of the worlwide-known coffee phenomenon area. By the end of the 18th century, coffee was one of the world’s most profitable export products, thank to the travelers and missionares, traders and colonists.
But how was the exact journey of those coffee beans to your table and cup? We promise in the next episode we will tell you a lot about this.