COFFEE'S CREATION MYTH - KALDI AND THE DANCING GOATS This is the story of an Ethiopian goat herder who napped on the job and awoke to discover his goats missing. He searched and searched and finally saw them on a distant hillside dancing around a wild coffee tree. He made his way to them and saw that they were eating red berries from the tree. Curious about the dazzling energy of his usually lackadaisical goats, Kaldi decided to try the berries. He, too, experienced the burst of energy we now know as a caffeine rush. The coffee berries became a daily habit and when a local Islamic monk questioned the goat herder about his transformation, Kaldi introduced him to the tree. The monk then experimented with different ways of preparing the berries and began to serve a tea made from steeping them to his monastery to help keep the monks alert during prayer. (Wait a minute, aren't monks credited with discovering beer, too??)

YE OLDE DAYS OF COFFEE Whether or not Kaldi discovered the wonders of the coffee tree, we do know that the earliest records of coffee consumption are from Islamic monasteries in the homeland of Ethiopia. From there it spread throughout the Ottoman Empire. First coveted for it's medicinal properties, it was the social effects of coffee that made it an integral part of Arab life and by the mid sixteenth century the world's first coffeehouses were opening in Constantinople, Cairo and Mecca. Europeans were introduced to coffee by Venetian traders and quickly started their own love affair with the cherished bean. In 1645 the first European coffeehouse opened in Venice and five years later the first British coffeehouse opened at Oxford. By 1715 there were as many as 2,000 coffeehouses in London alone (Eat your heart out Starbucks!) France and the Germanic states soon followed suit. With the colonial powers developing an insatiable thirst for coffee it was merely a matter of time before coffee cultivation became a colonial priority. The Dutch were the first to pursue large scale coffee commerce with extensive cultivation in Indonesia. By 1720 the Dutch East Indies Company controlled the price of coffee in an increasingly lucrative trade. Not to be outdone, the French turned to tropical lands under their control in the New World. A French naval officer named Mathieu Gabriel de Clieu was charged with escorting a small coffee plant on a transatlantic journey to Martinique. The journey was fraught with drama: pirates, storms and a potable water shortage that forced de Clieu to share his allotment of water with the plant. De Clieu succeeded and within three years there were millions of coffee plants in the West Indies. From there coffee cultivation spread to Brazil and then Central America.

COFFEE COUNTER CULTURE Coffee was counter-culture long before the Beat Generation. In the late sixteenth century Muslim authorities began to see the free wheeling discourse common in coffeehouses as a threat to religious devotion. Coffee prohibitions were issued throughout the Muslim world, only to be met by intense public resistance and unrest. The pattern was to be repeated many times in the course of coffee history. In 1675 King Charles II shut down all London coffeehouses labeling them houses of sedition. Civil protests were so great that the ban lasted only a few days before the legality of coffee was reinstated by the King. In 1773 citizens of Boston convened at their local coffeehouse The Green Dragon, to plan the Boston Tea Party. In 1777 Prussia's Frederic the Great declared that coffee be banned because the profits from it mostly went to foreigners and its use cut into sales of domestically produced beer. Again, public outcry in favor of coffee overwhelmed the ruler's wishes. In 1789 a gathering of French intellectuals at Cafe' Foy incited the mob that ultimately brought down the Bastille.