Episode Details

The best known coffee origin story is set around 850 CE, when a goatherd named Kaldi, placed in Ethiopia or Arabia, sees his goats dancing after eating red berries from an unfamiliar bush. He tries them, feels a rush of energy, and brings them to a Sufi monastery, where the head monk calls them the devil's work and throws them into the fire. The smell of roasting beans changes his mind. The monks rake them from the embers, pour hot water over them, and find a drink that keeps them alert through night prayers.

The written trail is thinner. The tale first appears in 1671, in a Latin treatise on coffee published in Rome by Antoine Faustus Nairon, a Maronite professor of Oriental languages, and his herder has no name and lives in Arabia Felix, modern Yemen. The name Kaldi was popularized by William H. Ukers in his 1922 book All About Coffee. The legend still tracks real history: arabica grew wild only in Ethiopian highland forests, was first cultivated across the Red Sea in Yemen, and was drunk early by Yemeni Sufis.

• Caffeine works as the coffee plant's natural pesticide against insects and stimulates mammals by blocking adenosine receptors.
• Raw coffee cherries are stimulating but astringent, and roasting caramelizes sugars and releases the aroma in the story.
• Pouring hot water over the rescued beans stands in for the first hot water extraction.
• Sufi mystics called the drink kahwah and used it to stay awake during dhikr, since alcohol was forbidden.
• Cafes and roasters named Dancing Goat, Wandering Goat, and Kaldi's Coffee keep the legend in circulation, including in Ethiopia.