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| Illustration of a 17th century coffee house in Istanbul/Constantinople, Turkey |
National
Coffee Day is celebrated annually on September 29. People across the United
States celebrate one of the most beloved morning beverages on National Coffee
Day. It is a morning favorite, however, it is found being drunk throughout the
day either hot or cold and either black or with additives such as cream,
creamers, milk, sugar, flavored syrups and ice.
There
are many legendary accounts of how coffee first came to be but the earliest
credible evidence of either coffee drinking or the knowledge of the coffee tree
appears in the middle of the 15th century in the SUFI monasteries around Mokha
in Yemen. It was here where coffee seeds
were first roasted and brewed, similarly to how it is prepared today. Yemeni traders brought coffee back to their
homeland from Ethiopia and began to cultivate the seed.
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| Image from the University of California/Los Angeles Daily Bruin newspaper |
In
1670, coffee seeds were smuggled out of the Middle East by Baba Budan, as he
strapped seven coffee seeds onto his chest.
The first plants grown from these smuggled seeds were planted in
Mysore. It was then that coffee spread
to Italy, to the rest of Europe, to Indonesia and to the Americas.
In
1583, Leonard Rauwolf, a German physician, gave this description of coffee
after returning from a ten-year trip to the Near East:
A
beverage as black as ink, useful against numerous illnesses, particularly those of the stomach. It’s
consumers take it in the morning, quite frankly, in a porcelain cup that is
passed around and from which each one drinks a cupful. It is composed of water
and the fruit from a bush called bunnu.
—Léonard Rauwolf, Reise in die
Morgenländer (in German) (Wikipedia)
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