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Since the Boston Tea Party, Americans have been crazy for coffee, choosing it as their caffeine fix. But obviously that’s not the origin of java. Naturally, the history of coffee goes back much earlier.

A video clip that goes back to the very initial cup of coffee ever made and sipped, and afterwards it tracks the expansion of coffee around the globe. We all read the Ethiopian legend which claims the goat herdsman Kaldi uncovered the power of the coffee beans. However what happened afterwards?

So get out your Chemex, grind some beans, boil some water, and sit down to watch this history of coffee with a cup of your own.

Full story - the history of coffee

According to the legend, the energizing effects of the coffee bean were first uncovered by a goat herdsman called Kaldi, who lived on the Ethiopian plateau way back throughout the 9th century.

One day Kaldi discovered that after some of his heard had grazed on the bright red cherry of the coffee plant they appeared to possess limitless power, certainly more than the rest of his animals. As the story goes, this left them too stimulated to drop off to sleep in the evening, as their bundles of energy had them bounding everywhere.

A brief background

After Kaldi discovered how "spirited" his goats became after consuming the coffee berries, he ran to the local monastery to let the monks know. A monk developed a mixture from the berries and managed to stay up much later praying.

News of this new brew spread into Egypt and right into the Arabian peninsula, where coffee traveled east and west, finally getting in southeast Asia and the Americas. And it's been popular since.

But if we are to follow facts only, and not legends, the first validated evidence of either coffee drinking or knowledge of the coffee tree is from the early 15th century, in the Sufi monasteries of Yemen, spreading out quickly to Mecca and Medina. By the 16th century, it had actually gotten to the remainder of the Middle East, South India (Karnataka), Persia, Turkey, the Horn of Africa, and northern Africa. Coffee after that infected the Balkans, Italy, and to the rest of Europe, along with Southeast Asia and despite the restrictions imposed during the 15th century by religious leaders in Mecca and Cairo, and later on by the Catholic Church.

Etymology

It turns out the term "coffee" originate from Arabic. The word got in the English language in 1582 via the Dutch koffie, borrowed from the Turkish kahve, subsequently borrowed from the Arabic qahwah.

There is an even more interesting theory of the origin of the word, which you can read on Wikipedia here.

Modern Coffee History

The contemporary times race for convenience and productivity recognized that people are "losing" too much time making coffee. This is how instant coffee was created. David Strang, a New Zealander created it in 1889. Freeze-dried coffee was invented in 1938.

Decaffeinated coffee was created by Ludwig Roselius in 1903, filling a need for individuals who are hypersensitive to caffeine.

The coffee filter, the foundation of one of the most preferred coffee developing method, the drip coffee, was created by Melitta Bentz in 1908.

Achille Gaggia invented the contemporary coffee machine in 1946. The very first pump-driven coffee maker was made in 1960.

Today coffee is still one of the world's most in demand beverages. Brazil is still the globe's biggest producer of coffee.