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Said
about coffee:
"Black as the night
Hot
as hell
Pure like a angel
Lovely as love"
Talleyrand
1754-1838
The
fairy-tale about coffee
For
approx 1500 years ago, in the Ethiopian mountains,
there lived a shepherd named Kaldi. One day Kaldi thought
his goats acted strangely. They jumped around and was full of
life.
Even the oldest goat acted as
it was young again. Soon Kaldi
discovered that
the goats had eaten red berrys from
a bush and that were
the reason for the creatures to
act so strange. Kaldi went to a
Monastery and told
the Abbot about what has happened.
The
Abbot decided to examine the magic berrys.
He picked some red berrys from the bush, pured hot water
over and then he drank it. To his astonishment he discovered
that he became alert and could keep himself awake for several
hours.
The Abbot told the monks to drink it in order to
keep themselves awake during the evening prayers.
Soon
the Monastery was called : ´The Awake Monastery´.
If
the story about Kaldi and the goats is true would the Abbot
and the monks been the worlds very first coffedrinkers.
The
storys about how coffee became known are many.
The only thing one knows for sure is that the coffee tree
descends from Ethiopia´s rocky southwest parts and
that therefrom they was spred further to the Arabic peninsula.
This is supposed to has happened about 500 years A.C.
The coffee was orgiginally seen as a religious
beverage with medical qualities.
In the beginning one boiled and ate the berrys and leaves.
Not until some time in the 1200 one began to toast
the coffebean. As time went, it was going further from the
Arabic peninsula, by the sales trades both East and North.
In the middle on 1600 the coffe reached Europe.
Well,
now it´s time for a coffee break!!
