A Brief History of Ethiopian Coffee | Part One: Stories of Love

Love Story One: Pride & Pollination

Before instagrammable latte art. Before Nespresso pods. Before minimalist hipster coffee shops and pretentious baristas. Before V60s and espresso machines. Before instant coffee, coffee canisters, and the great commodity plantations of Brazil and Sumatra. Before the Green Dragon Coffee House. Before the American Revolution and the French Revolution. Before the Renaissance. Before Turkish pots and the Ottoman Empire. Before the Sufi mystics. Before Ethiopia, before the Oromo, before Kaldi.

Before humanity.

Six hundred thousand to a million years ago, in the southern part of a land known today as Ethiopia, one plant met another plant and fell in love.

Maybe they knew each other’s names and spoke them to each other in a language we couldn’t possibly comprehend. What we know these two plants now as are coffea canephora and coffea eugenioides. They met in the same place as Adam and Eve, the Great Rift Valley, the Garden of Eden. In the jungles of that valley, one pollinated the other and created something new; coffea arabica.

That little shrub that resulted from this union would end up, hundreds of thousands of years later,  impacting the species known as man in ways large and small that none could have ever imagined, save God.

Love Story Two: When Berry Met Sally

When human beings first came upon this plant, they were tribal people. Specifically, the Oromo of the Ethiopian highlands. They didn’t brew it. They didn’t steam it. They didn’t pour it through paper filters or calibrate grind size. They consumed as it is; a fruit. The way anyone would consume any fruit, by eating it.

They combined it with animal fat. In doing so, they discovered its effects: sharpening the mind, increasing energy, warding off sleep. They used it in battle and in hunting, to make their senses more acute and to keep their stomachs satieted. It was said that a single small round ball of this animal fat and coffee creation could satiate a warrior for an entire day.

They carried this practice for centuries. Even as late as 1790, a Scottish traveler named James Bruce documented it. During long campaigns of battle, he wrote, Oromo warriors would carry no other food besides spheres of pulverized coffee beans mixed with butter.

They held the plant in such high regard they had a name for that reverence, they called it Buna Qala, “slaughtering bean” or “slaughtering coffee,” placing it at the same level and value as slaughtering an animal. And not in some tongue and cheek way. There was mythology too, as there always is when a people love something enough. The Oromo believed the plant came from the tears of their supreme deity, Waka, and that it sprouted from the land where his tears fell. Coffee was braided into the physical and spiritual life of these people.

Love Story Three: Rapture

These days, for the most part, we don’t consume coffee as food. Not really. Well… tiramisu I guess… chocolate covered espresso beans. Basically as an ingredient here and there. But for the most part, if you’re talking about coffee, it’s not something you chew, it’s a drink.

So when did the drinking begin?

The origins of coffee as a beverage have a few different stories. Some rooted in serious history, others likely conceived later on. And i’d be remiss not to mention the story of Kaldi, the one we hear time and time and time again.

The story goes that around 850 AD, an Ethiopian farmer named Kaldi noticed his goats acting unusually spirited. He investigated and found them eating from a shrub, the coffee plant. He consumed the fruit himself, felt a surge of energy and alertness, and “discovered” coffee.

It’s a story that matters culturally. It’s memorable. It’s clean. It’s a perfect origin myth.

It’s also almost certainly not true.

There’s no historical record of it until around 1671, which is extremely late in the history of coffee for an “origin” story. And I can tell you from personal experience, as someone who has spent a great deal of time on farms that have both coffee and goats: I have never seen a goat consume coffee cherries. The farmers I work with will tell you the same.

Point being, the story is unlikely. Verging on impossible.

The more established story, the one that has much more historical refence, takes us into the 14th and 15th centuries, into Ethiopia, and specifically into Harar.

At that time, the Adal Sultanate, a powerful Muslim rulership, controlled the trade routes between the Ethiopian interior and the Red Sea ports of Zeila and Berbera. Under much of the land influenced by the Sultanate, coffee was being grown, cultivated, and used. Not necessarily commercialized yet in the way the modern world understands commercialization, but utilized, especially by the Oromo but by others as well.

During this period, a Muslim scholar and Sufi sage named Ali ibn Omar al-Shadhili, from the ancient scholarly city of Tarim in Yemen, resided for a time in the court of the Adal Sultanate in Harar. A committed practitioner of the Shadhili order, he placed great importance on night vigil prayers, the qiyam, the small hour of the night when the Islamic tradition holds that special asrar (spiritual secrets) are delivered directly from the heavens with greater frequency and greater impact to the seeker who awakens to prayer and remembrance.

The Shaykh married a local Ethiopian woman from Harar, and historians suspect she likely introduced him to coffee as it was consumed there.

And then something happened that changed everything.

The story goes that upon consuming the beans, inspiration came to him in a dream to roast it, grind it, and brew it into a beverage.

He returned to Yemen, particularly the city of Mokha, and began the practice of Sufi gatherings centered around coffee as a drink. These were the first coffee houses. They weren’t places where people came to pay a penny for a cup and plot revolutions. The first coffee houses were places of worship. Places where you would come, be served this incredible drink for free, and spend the night in prayer, remembrance, and if you’re really dedicated; rapture. 

The Breakup… and makeup.

Coffee spread through the Muslim world at breakneck speed. And it became known to Christians as “the wine of Islam,” the “Mohammedan berry”. In other words, a drink of the other… in some cases, the enemy.

In Orthodox Christian Ethiopia, this mattered.

The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, the spiritual backbone of the northern empires, viewed coffee with deep suspicion. Not because of the plant itself. Because of culture. Coffee was associated with Muslims. With competing empires. For devout Christians, the smell of roasting coffee represented a threat. It’s written Christians caught drinking it could be excommunicated or ostracized.

And the prohibition was effective enough that foreign travelers in the early 19th century noted something astonishing: coffee grew wild in the Christian south and west, but it was left unharvested, or traded only by Muslim merchants.

Even as European Christendom embraced coffee, Ethiopian Christianity held onto this ancient baggage.

That didn’t change until the late 19th century, under Emperor Menelik II.

Menelik understood something very clearly. European powers were encroaching across Africa, and his lands weren’t safe. He saw in coffee, major potential for economic strength. As one of several sources of wealth that could build armies, fund the purchase of modern armaments, and resist colonization. But he couldn’t do that as long as the stigma remained in a Christian empire that treated the drink as a mark of the enemy.

So he did something simple and political. He began to drink coffee publicly.

A performance, yes. A signal, absolutely. A clear message to the ruling class: leave this taboo in the past.

And then, by persuasion, pressure, or some mix of both, he managed to convince the influential Coptic bishop Abuna Matewos, head of the Ethiopian church at the time, to also consume it, and to issue a decisive religious decree: coffee was a plant given to the earth by God, and had no inherent connection, no inherent allegiance, to Islam.

To signify it, the two drank coffee together publicly.

And interestingly enough, in the period following that, the development of  what we now know as the Ethiopian coffee ritual took root.

For those unfamiliar with this I would recommend watching some videos of it. And if you do ever get the opportunity, the honor to visit the wonderful country of Ethiopia, I highly recommend you seek out this ritual to experience it firsthand for yourself.

It wasn’t enough for the drink to be publicly destigmatized. It had to be fully integrated into Ethiopian Christian life. So the ritual became layered with cultural/religious symbolism: the burning of frankincense, the washing of the beans as a reflection of baptism, the drinking of three cups as a mirror of the Trinity.

A drink that had been seen as Muslim became fully Ethiopian, Christian and Muslim alike.

The Bean that Saved the Empire

Menelik expanded his empire to enrich it through coffee, ivory and gold. As it turned out, for a  number of reasons, coffee proved to be the most lucrative. It became Ethiopia’s primary export commodity, pushing the empire further south. He implemented systems where soldiers were assigned to local farmers and demanded tribute payments in the form of coffee beans, forcing expansion of coffee farms to meet those obligations.

Landlords and provincial governors, including Ras Makonnen in Harar, the father of the future Emperor Haile Selassie, established private coffee estates to capitalize on rising international demand. The Ethio-Djibouti railway expanded the flow, transporting coffee more efficiently, scaling exports to meet the ever increasing appetites of European and American markets.

And the revenue generated by coffee, alongside other key exports, provided the Ethiopian empire with the wealth necessary to purchase modern armaments from Europe and Russia. The imperial Ethiopian military, armed with modern rifles and artillery, defeated the Italian colonial forces at the Battle of Adwa in 1896. This is a military feat not in the hands of guerrilla fighters but at the hands of an organized trained imperial military force, something rare in the history of colonialism.

The commercialization of coffee is one of the major reasons Ethiopia remained one of the small handful of African countries that largely maintained their independence during the colonial period.

And so…

Coffee as origin, coffee as sacred food, coffee as Sufi rapture, coffee as cultural conflict, coffee as nation-building.

Part One is the love story of an Ethiopian, Part Two is where the love story gets complicated.

Because the moment coffee becomes a global commodity, it stops belonging only to the people who birthed it. It gets measured, regulated, graded, taxed, controlled. It gets pulled into the machinery of modern states and modern markets. More money, more problems. Pride and burden, blessing and battleground, tradition and transaction.

Stay tuned, friends. And stay caffeinated.