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April 11, 2009 | By admin In Coffee |

Coffee

The story of how coffee growing and drinking spread around the world is one of the greatest and most romantic in history.

It starts in the Horn of Africa, in Ethiopia, where the coffee tree probably originated in the province of Kaffa. One story has it that an Ethiopian goatherd was amazed at the lively behaviour of his goats after chewing red coffee berries.

Coffee was certainly being cultivated in Yemen by the 15th century and probably much earlier than that. Yemen actively encouraged coffee drinking as it was considered preferable to the extreme side effects of Kat, a shrub whose buds and leaves were chewed as a stimulant.

The first coffeehouses were opened in Mecca and were called ‘kaveh kanes’. They were luxuriously decorated and each had an individual character. The Arabian coffeehouses soon became centres of political activity and were suppressed. Coffee and coffeehouses were subsequently banned several times over the next few decades, but they kept reappearing.

Mocha - was also the main port for the one sea route to Mecca, and was the busiest place in the world at the time. The coffee bean is the seed of the coffee tree, but when stripped of its outer layers it becomes infertile.