Coffee Tales

Coffee, a rich, enlivening drink, popular the world over, got its start in Ethiopia, home to a plant whose caffeine-rich berries could be mixed with fat and eaten or pulped and fermented to make wine. From Africa the berries traveled to Yemen—they are first mentioned by an eleventh-century Arab physician—where the practice of extracting, roasting, and grinding their beans seems to have appeared during the thirteenth century. Yemenis, who made an infusion from the drink, named it qahwah, a poetic word for wine; hence the botanical name for the most important coffee tree: coffea arabica.