History and traditional Arabic coffee

Traditional Arabic coffee
Originally uploaded by Fahad.m

It is supposed that the Ethiopians, says Wikipedia, the ancestors of today's Oromo people, were the first to have discovered and recognized the energizing effect of the coffee bean plant.[4] However, no direct evidence has ever been found revealing exactly where in Africa coffee grew or who among the natives might have used it as a stimulant or even known about it there earlier than the seventeenth century.[4]

The story of Kaldi, the 9th-century Ethiopian goatherd who discovered coffee, did not appear in writing until 1671 and is probably apocryphal.[4] The earliest credible evidence of either coffee drinking or knowledge of the coffee tree appears in the middle of the fifteenth century, in the Sufi monasteries of the Yemen in southern Arabia.[4]

From Ethiopia, coffee spread to Egypt and Yemen.[16] It was in Arabia that coffee beans were first roasted and brewed, similar to how it is done today. By the 15th century, it had reached the rest of the Middle East, Persia, Turkey, and northern Africa. From the Muslim world, coffee spread to Italy, then to the rest of Europe, to Indonesia, and to the Americas.[5]