Your Coffee Is Much Older and More Legendary Than It Seems
Long Attributed to One Goatherd, Coffee’s True Origin Story Starts in the Ethiopian Highlands
The origin story of coffee could use an update. While archaeological evidence suggests the coffee shrub, genus Coffea, and specifically C. Arabica, is millennia old, growing up unobtrusively in the southern reaches of the Ethiopian highlands, the legend of coffee’s earliest discovery, which comes from the region, only dates to around the year 800 C.E.
The story is the oft-related tale of Kaldi the goatherd. As the story goes, after Kaldi watched his flock jump excitedly around after eating berries from a certain bush, the goatherd decided to taste the beans …
