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THE ORIGIN OF COFFEE
Whether from Algalia, where the wild cat of the humid African forests ate coffee cherries to then deposit their seeds near to the villages; or
from the mountains of Ethiopia where goats roamed exhaulted after chewing the leaves of the plant, and passing through the sumptuous stores of Arab emirs, crossing almost as a fugitive over the borders of the
Orient, Coffea, of the family rubiaceas, charmed its way into the salons of Europe. It arrived to America on the sly sharing the robbers portion of a sailor's water, who cares for it as a thief cares
for his booty.
The word "coffee" is derived from the Arab word Kahwah and arrives to the West via the Turkish word Kahweh. Writing about the etymology of the word, E. Deschamps coments:
"And since everyone said that coffee comes from Arabia, there was, it seems, nothing else to do than to give it the name Coffea arábica,
even though it was later discovered that another 40 species of the same genus grow spontaneously in tropical regions of Asia and Africa".
COFFEE'S PROMISED LAND
During the 15th Century, coffee spread from Ethiopia throughout the Arab world. By the 17th Century sufficient amounts were being produced to meet the demands of consumers in the Orient.
Coffee was first received by Europe with aversion, but was soon all the rage in Paris where the nobility accepted it as an Oriental luxury
worthy of appreciation. The first coffee house in Europe was the Blue Bottle Cafe in Vienna. At the beginning of 18th Century, Arabia supplied all of Europe's coffee needs. Europeans attempted to cultivate coffee using dried seeds, but failed. As a result, coffee was cultivated in her colonies.
And so it came to be that the "promised land" of coffee would be on the other side of the Atlantic. Until the beginning of the 17th Century, coffee was and imported product in the New World, but soon plantations were to be found in colonies with agreeable climates, such as Haiti, Santo Domingo, Jamaica, Brazil, Colombia, Bolivia, Puerto Rico, Costa Rica, Venezuela, Mexico and El Salvador.
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