Hello ,
Kev here :-),
Did You Know?
The Khaldi the goatherd story... | |
Is a fairytale!
If you've ever googled anything about the history or origins of coffee, you'll undoubtedly come across the story of a goatherd called Kaldi or Khaldi, who is supposedly the person who discovered coffee?
Legend has it that his goats had an energy boost when munching on the cherries of a particular small tree, so he thought he'd try it himself.
Exhilarated by chewing these berries himself, he took the berries to a Monk, well of coarse he did, what else would a goatherd do after munching some berries?
The monk launched them on a fire, because, that makes sense... and an amazing aroma filled the room.
He ordered the embers to be removed from the fire, and for hot water to be poured on them, of course, because again, that makes perfect sense.
They drank this mixture which filled them with a peaceful warming sensation (yeah right, murky fire ember water with a hint of really quickly roasted coffee beans, sounds lovely), and the monk shared this discovery with other monks, and there we have an explanation for the discovery of coffee.
It's all true, and while he was at it Kaldi or Khaldi tripped over one of big-foot's shoes (they're really big), and then bumped into the Loch Ness Monster who was there on his holidays.
Speaking of Ethiopian coffee, have you tried Melon & Toffee Ethiopia, from The Coffeeworks? This is a light roast, great for V60, good for espresso too as long as you have the setup to extract it, as light roasts are a bit more challenging.
This coffee is grown in the Lekempti region of Oromia in Ethiopia, by the Bulechala co-operative, a co-op of over two thousand small holders covering an area of approx. 4,000 acres of classic Ethiopian Heirloom varietals.
| | | | This story is shared so often as if it has any resemblance to the true origins of coffee, but you don't have to look into this very deeply to figure out that if Khaldi really did make this discovery, he was very late to the coffee party.
It's like me now proclaiming to have stumbled upon this amazing thing called gravity ;-).
That would be silly, but actually the period between now and Sir Isaac Newton getting an apple to the noggin, is a much much shorter period of time since the probable first use of coffee and the supposed date of the Khaldi coffee discovery story.
OK, more credible publications that include this story do state that it's apocryphal, but they use the story nevertheless, for want of a more concrete explanation, but there is one, and it's staring us right in the face.
The use of coffee in Ethiopia pre-dates this story by at least a couple of thousand years, from what I can see, as a food to begin with, so a local goatherd shouldn't have been surprised in the 9th century to find goats being energized by the cherries that people of the area had been using for their energetic properties for a very long time by that point.
The Ethiopian coffee ritual has been an important part of daily life there for a long time, but where did it start?
If you jump in a time machine and go the forests of Oromia, a huge region stretching right across Ethiopia, at least a couple of millennia before the time that Kaldi supposedly discovered coffee, you'll find the Oromo people.
These people lived in these forests for millennia, and over this time they became to know every animal, every tree, every berry. Of course everyone growing up there would know what they could or couldn't eat.
The Oromo people knew that they could eat the cherries of the coffee tree.
One of their traditions involved wearing an animal skin pouch which was filled with small balls made of a mixture of coffee cherries and animal fat.
These "world's first energy bars" were a caffeinated mixture of fats and sugars which kept them going on long hunting and gathering trips.
From what I can gather, depending on the date that you set your time machine to, if you go to an earlier time you'll find raw coffee cherries being used with animal fat, and then at some point you'll find that this evolved to removing the seeds and cooking them, crushing them and then mixing them with the animal fat for a more potent energetic mixture.
If you keep taking your time machine back to this area every hundred years or so (so many uses for a time machine, the most obvious being going to a few days ago to buy a Euro Millions ticket...) you will find at some point that the relationship with coffee has evolved further, and you'll find people in Ethiopia now brewing what is today known as "coffee" as an important part of their culture.
So it would appear to make perfect sense to me that the origins of coffee is simply a process of evolution which started with the indigenous people of this region of Ethiopia first counting coffee cherries as one of their 5 a day. | |
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