Do You Know the Real Story of How Coffee Was Discovered?

Despite petty squabbles about "where" and "when", most agree that coffee had been used as a beverage and/or food in Ethiopia long before the stories of its "discovery' began to circulate. With that in mind, however, no self-respecting coffee site would be complete without including the fable about how coffee was discovered.
In Ethiopia, there was an excellent goat herder named Kaldi, who suddenly awakened from a rather distressing dream to discover his goats behaving quite conspicuously. One of his old bucks was kicking up dust and cavorting around like a kid goat and the rest of the herd, well they just weren’t at all themselves. (in a good way!)

Upon further investigation he discovered that they were quickly and happily consuming the berries of a native bush. Still recovering from his depressing dream, Kaldi, pinching himself to make sure he really was awake, decided that what’s obviously good for the goat must be good for the goat herder. He thus descended upon the bush with abandon, gulping berries with unbridled enthusiasm!

Soon he became full of vigor, completely forgetting his bad dream, and joined in the happy dance with his goats. It would have been a sad thing that day if Kaldi had taken this discovery to his grave but, thankfully, fate took a much kinder twist.

One fine day a monk happened by to discover a mesmerizing ballet of sorts going on with Kaldi and his goats. In his astonishment, he questioned Kaldi in regards to the origin of such riotous celebration. Kaldi joyfully shared the story of the bush and the magical berries.

The monk, being a wise old soul, perceived the magical enlightening berries as a divine revelation of sorts, a gift from God as it were, solving his problem of falling sound asleep during meditation. He saw it as a way to help his brothers solve similar problems with focus and concentration desperately needed during long hours on the... uh... the internet! Yeh, that's it!

He then spent many days experimenting with the cleaning, drying, and grinding of the berries and the making of a “tea”. Thus, Kaldi and the wise old monk, however inadvertently, gave the priceless gift of  Friday's Coffee to the world!


Well the story went something like that.

Raise Your Mugs,

fridayscoffee.com