Coffee House

Sunday Evening

Traditional Turkish Coffee and delicious sweets by the renowned bakers of PantherVale! Relax and enjoy the entertainers of the realm as you sip your coffee and taste the delectable morsels of the Coffee House! We invite all to try a hand at performing; leave that shy nature at home, come and try out that new song, joke, or story in this fun, laid-back venue.

All Arabica coffees of the world are indigenous to Ethiopia, from the province of Kaffa which means coffee. The theory is that the coffee grew wildly (before the existence of man whose traces in Ethiopia are the oldest in the world) to the northwest of the capital Addis Ababa, on the island of Lake Tana, where the use and cultivation were fostered, according to the legend, by monks who needed to keep themselves awake during the night long religious ceremonies.

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Despite the fact that the coffee bush grows wild in the highlands throughout Africa, there is no evidence coffee was known or used by anyone in the ancient Greek, Roman, Middle Eastern or African worlds. Although European and Arab historians repeat legendary African accounts or cite lost written references from as early as the 6th century, there are no documents that can establish coffee drinking or knowledge of coffee earlier than the middle of the 15th century in the Sufi monasteries of the Yemen in southern Arabia (Weinberg 3).

Origins
The coffee bush was first discovered around 1000AD. There are several stories about how its effects were first observed. One story is about Kaldi, an Ethiopian goatherd, who noticed his flock was wide awake after eating the berries off of a certain bush. When he tried the berries for himself, he found that he too became awake and energetic. Members of the Galla tribe in Ethiopia found they were able to produce an energy boost from mixing a certain berry with animal fat and ingesting it. They soon realised that the coffee bean produced certain effects upon not only their livestock, but themselves as well. The desire to capture and use the effects of coffee started the quest for cultivation and production of coffee throughout the world.

Other tribes of northeastern Africa are said to have cooked the berries as a porridge or drunk a wine fermented from the fruit and skin and mixed with cold water (Weinberg 5). Despite the fact that no written records exist, we can conlude from the plant's prevalence across Africa that coffee was growing wild or under cultivation throughout the continent and possibly other places during the construction of the Pyramids, the waging of the Trojan War, and the conquest of Alexander the Great through Persia, and that the drink continued to spread and gain popularity through the rise and fall of the Roman Empire and the early Middle Ages (Weinberg 5).

The mystical Shadhili Sufi, to the east of Ethiopia in Yemen, seem to have been among the first to embrace coffee. It was in the mountains of northern Yemen that the arabica was first domesticated and for two and a half centuries Yemen held a virtual world monopoly on coffee production.

Yemen Mountain Waterfall

There is evidence that the coffee plant and the coffee bean's action as a stimulant were known in Arabia by the time of the great Islamic physician and astronomer Abu Bakr Muhammad ibn Zakariya El Razi, aka "Rhazes". In his lost medical textbook, Rhazes describes the nature and effects of a plant named "bunn" and a beverage named "buncham". The oldest extant document referring to buncham is The Canon of Medicine by Avicenna at the turn of the 11th century. In the 5th part of his book he mentions that Buncham...comes from Yemen (Weinberg 6) and that the unroasted beans are yellow. His description of the humoral properties of buncham are consistent with caffeine. The fact that there exists a large gap between the first mention of coffee in 1000 AD by Avicenna and later accounts in 1500, is puzzling.

In the mid-to-late 1600s, Dutch traders became interested in the possibilities of coffee cultivation and trading. In 1696, they brought cuttings of coffee trees from India to the island of Java in what was known then as the West Indies. Ten years later, in 1706, the first crop of Java coffee beans along with a coffee plant was shipped to the Amsterdam botanical gardens. Trees cultivated in this garden were sent to other botanical gardens around Europe and eventually to the royal botanical gardens of King Louis XIV of France in 1714. The seeds from the King's tree were sent to all of his New World colonies and eventually to South America, Central America and Mexico.

The First Written References
There is evidence that the coffee plant and the coffee bean's action as a stimulant were known in Arabia by the time of the great Islamic physician and astronomer Abu Bakr Muhammad ibn Zakariya El Razi, aka "Rhazes". In his lost medical textbook, Rhazes describes the nature and effects of a plant named "bunn" and a beverage named "buncham". The oldest extant document referring to buncham is The Canon of Medicine by Avicenna at the turn of the 11th century. In the 5th part of his book he mentions that Buncham...comes from Yemen (Weinberg 6) and that the unroasted beans are yellow. His description of the humoral properties of buncham are consistent with caffeine. The fact that there exists a large gap between the first mention of coffee in 1000 AD by Avicenna and later accounts in 1500, is puzzling.

African and Arabian Preparations for Coffee
While we do not know all the details of the earliest Arab preparations, the best information we can gather is that Arab traders brought coffee back to their homeland from Africa for planting and made two drinks. Kisher, a tealike beverage was steeped from the fruit's dried husks. Bounya, was a thick brew of crushed beans, drunk unfiltered with sediment. A Levantine refinement introduced the technique of roasting the beans on stone trays before boiling them in water, then straining and reboiling them with fresh water in a process repeated several times. We do know that the berries were eaten whole at first or mixed iwth fat. Later the fermented pulp was used for wine and about 1000 AD a decoction was made of the dried fruit, beans, hull and all. The practice of roasting the beans was started around the 13th century (Davidson). Other developments included pounding the beans to a powder with a mortar and pestle after roasting and mixing with boiled water. It wasn't until the 16th century that Islamic coffee drinkers invented the ibrik, a small coffee boiler that made brewing easier and quicker. In the 18th century, ground coffee was placed in a cloth bag what was then deposited in the pot and steeped (Weinberg 23)

Weinberg, Bennett and Bonnie Bealer. 2001. The World of Caffeine. New York: Routledge.

Article blatantly plagiarized from The Coffee Bean Shop and from Wombleweb...