Though coffee is grown in more than 70 countries, the top four producers of coffee supply over 60% of the world’s coffee . These coffee producing countries only consume 30% of the world’s coffee while the remaining 70% is traded internationally. The United States is the highest coffee importing country, followed by Germany and Italy. Even more impressive is the number of people who depend on coffee for their livelihoods; around 25 million smallholder farmers produce 80% of the world’s coffee and some 125 million human beings rely on it for their living . Besides providing your daily brew, the coffee tree and its beans have a myriad of other uses. Before coffee existed, the Ethiopians brewed the leaves and cherries in boiled water to make a tea infusion . Beans could be ground up, mixed with animal fat, and formed into a ball to make an energy rich snack. Wine could be made from the fermented fruit. The mesocarp and endocarp have been used in manures and mulches. Wood from coffee trees is hard, durable, and dense, making it suitable for furniture. Surprisingly, coffee beans can also be used to make a type of plastic, called coffelite . Though most famous for caffeine , coffee actually has a very complex chemical profile, reported to contain more than a thousand different chemicals including carbohydrates, lipids, nitrogenous compounds, vitamins, minerals, alkaloids and phenolic compounds . As a result, nft hydroponic system much research has been conducted to assess the health profile of coffee and analyze the effects of coffee consumption .

So far, moderate coffee consumption has been associated with reduced risk of several diseases such as Parkinson’s disease , liver disease , Type 2 diabetes , and Alzheimer’s disease . At the same time, excessive coffee consumption is not recommended, as increased caffeine intake can have negative side effects.While the true origin of coffee drinking and the coffee plant remains obscure, most texts, stories, and legends tie the origin of the beverage to Yemen and the discovery of the plant back to Ethiopia. The first written mention of coffee was by a 10th century Arabian physician named Rhazes, who described the nature and effects of a plant named bunn and the beverage, buncham, made from it . Reference to coffee drinking or knowledge of the coffee tree can be traced back no earlier than the 15th century, in the Sufi monasteries of Yemen in southern Arabia . The myth of Kaldi, related by Antoine FausThus Nairon, describes how the Ethiopian goatherd discovered coffee after noticing the energizing effects the coffee beans had on his flock. However, the authenticity of this account is questionable, considering its lack of reference in earlier Arabic sources. Another origin story, often told in Arabian tradition, highlights the role of the African civet cat in dispersing the seeds of the coffee plant from central Africa to the Ethiopian mountains . The plant was cultivated by the Galla warriors and then brought to Arabia by a merchant. Both of these stories attribute the Ethiopians with being the first to discover the stimulating effects of the coffee plant.Soon after the Ethiopians discovered coffee, the beans traveled to Yemen via trade across the Red Sea . Adopted first by the Sufi Muslims as a drink to keep them awake during midnight prayers, coffee eventually became a casual beverage. By the end of the 15th century, the drink spread throughout the Islamic world . When the Ottoman Turks occupied Yemen in 1536, the coffee bean became an important export, cultivated and shipped from the port of Mocha until the late 19th century.

As a result, coffee from that region became known as Mocha. Having acquired such a valuable export, the Turks became protective of their trees in Yemen, not allowing any berries capable of germination to leave the country . For this reason, coffee smuggling arose, with the first case attributed to Baba Budan, a pilgrim from India . Supposedly, Budan strapped seven coffee seeds from Mecca to his belly, and successfully cultivated them in Mysore. Soon enough the Dutch caught on, and in 1616, they transported a tree from Aden, a port city in Yemen, to Holland . From that tree’s offspring, cultivation of coffee in Ceylon was born. Later in 1699, another Dutchman transplanted trees from Malabar to Java, followed by the cultivation of trees in the East Indies. Coffee was first brought to Europe by travelers in a region known as Levant . The first European to mention coffee in writing was the German physician and botanist, Leonard Rauwolf . Served chaube in Aleppo, Syria, he noted the “very good drink” was “as black as ink” and “very good in illness.” Once introduced, coffee spread like wildfire among the European countries, followed by the establishment of coffee houses. By the early 18th century, there were over two thousand coffee houses in London, which became centers for social, political, literary and commercial lift . Coffee was becoming a mainstay in Europe, and the controversial drink even inspired Johann Sebastian Bach to write his famous Coffee Cantata in 1735 . The secular cantata tells of a young Aria who loves coffee, but her strict father is wholly against it. As for the rest of the world, European colonization was largely responsible for the dissemination of coffee to South America, Africa, the Caribbean, South and Southeast Asia . European missionaries, merchants, and ambassadors introduced both the word and the drink to East Asian countries. Coffee cups, either made of porcelain or clay, are the primary archaeological evidence for coffee consumption . The tiny cups that were used drink coffee were typically made out of porcelain and distinct from other cups in that they had no handles .

Referred to as fenjeyn , these porcelain cups were first imported to the Middle East from China in the 16th century . The cups imported from China had distinct Chinese styles, an important component used in identifying the shift in coffee usage. As coffee spread to Europe, Chinese porcelain cups were gradually replaced by Western styles and products, as evidenced by large finds of coffee cups recovered from shipwrecks within the Red Sea and excavations throughout the Middle East . As a result, the shift in material culture appropriately reflected the spread of coffee from the Ottoman Empire to Central and Western Europe .Many cognates, words that share the same root and develop from a common ancestor, for coffee can be found in the several hundreds of languages rooted in Indo-European language family. For example, compare the Italian caffè, the French café, the German kaffee, the Danish and Swedish kaffe, the English coffee, and the Dutch koffie. Not only do these cognates sound remarkably similar to each other, but they also resemble the Finnish kahvi. Yet Finnish and English grew on entirely separate language family trees—Finnish is Uralic and English is IndoEuropean. This indicates that coffee is a loan word, a word borrowed from another language . Most likely this is an indication that cultures that borrowed the word for coffee adopted the crop fairly recently. Coffee, being a new commodity, bounced from one language to another, just as the beverage was picked up from one place to another. The word coffee found its way into the European languages from the Turkish kahveh, which in turn was derived from the Arabic word qahwah . However, the origin of qahwah, which means “wine” in Arabic, is obscure. Some say the word qahwah refers to the Kaffa province of southwestern Ethiopia, where coffee is grown today . This etymology has been disputed though, since the Oromo people of Ethiopia refer to the coffee berries as bun. Instead, many argue that the Kaffa province was named for the bean. Other possible derivations for qahwah include quwwa , and kafta, the drink made from the khat plant . Nevertheless, qahwah was the word that spread to the four corners of the earth. Because it was the Arabic word for coffee that spread, this supported the hypothesis that Yemen was the origin of coffee drinking and, as we’ll see later, the center of dispersal for cultivated coffee. As coffee spread to numerous countries and different languages, the word and pronunciation was slightly adapted to better suit the natural sounds of those languages . As a result, no matter where you travel, hydroponic nft system you can almost always know when someone is offering you a cup of coffee.Even before the advent of DNA sequencing, it was well known that the southwestern highlands of Ethiopia were the home of wild C. arabica . Today, studies both at the phenotypic and genotypic levels have established southwestern Ethiopia as the primary center of origin and diversity for wild C. arabica. Just as the Persians are called the first coffee brewers, Meyer regarded Yemen as the primary dispersal center of cultivated C. arabica. He noted that C. arabica cultivated in Latin America, Kenya, India, Java, and other areas was originally derived from Yemen, due to early introduction of C. arabica from Ethiopia . As a result, Ethiopia was designated the dispersal center of wild C. arabica. From his documentations of wild C. arabica collected in the rainforests of Illubabor and Kaffa, Meyer concluded that the Arabica coffee plant was abundant and spontaneous in rainforest areas between 3000 and 6000 ft. altitude, indicating great diversity in these districts.

In addition, he observed that coffee rust fungus and C. arabica coexist harmoniously in the rainforests of Ethiopia, an observation that follows Vavilov’s statement of how “the center of origin of a cultivated plant is often correlated with the center of origin of associated pathogens” . Around 1715, coffee trees were introduced from Mocha to Bourbon Island , giving rise to the cultivar C. arabica var. bourbon Choussy . Along with Bourbon, another Arabica cultivar is grown worldwide: C. arabica var. arabica . The Typica variety is said to have originated from a single plant from Indonesia, subsequently cultivated in Amsterdam in the early 18th century . To identify the origin of these cultivated varieties, Anthony et al used ampliftied fragment length polymorphism and simple sequence repeats to assess the polymorphism between the Typica- and Bourbon-derived accessions and accessions derived from subspontaneous trees . They found less genetic diversity and polymorphism in the cultivated accessions compared to the subspontaneous-derived accessions, supporting the fact that dissemination of coffee and selection has reduced the genetic diversity otherwise present in subspontaneous coffee of Ethiopia. Ethiopian origin of the Typica and Bourbon genetic bases was further substantiated by the fact that all AFLP markers in the cultivated accessions, except for one, were also found in the subspontaneous-derived accessions. Classification of the AFLP markers by Anthony et al also confirmed the separation between coffee trees growing east and west of the Great Rift Valley, proposed by Montagnon and Bouharmont . In their 1996 paper, Montagnon and Bouharmont revealed a separation between the southwestern and south- and southeastern trees, based on characterization of phenotypic traits affected by domestication. Anthony et al later verified their results through random ampliftied polymorphic DNA markers. Seeing that the southern and southeastern coffee trees were little differentiated from the southwestern trees, Anthony et al supported the hypothesis that trees in the south and southeast were introduced from the southwest. This did not, however, preclude the idea that cultivated plants might have been selected from wild-type plants east of the Rift, another hypothesis of C. arabica origin suggested by Montagnon and Bouharmont . At the discovery of this split, Montagnon and Bouharmont declared that a single center of wild coffee trees in Ethiopia was highly unlikely. Rather, there was a second center east of the Great Rift Valley, which may have been the source of domestication of C. arabica in Yemen.To determine whether the southeastern group gave rise to C. arabica in Yemen, Silvestrini et al compared the genetic diversity and structure of Ethiopian, Yemen and Brazilian C. arabica accessions using microsatellite markers . Their analyses not only showed that accessions from Sidamo, a province in southern Ethiopia, were more closely related to cultivated plants, but also that one accession from Sidamo was grouped within the Yemen group. On top of that, they observed similarity between accessions from Yemen and eastern Ethiopia, leading them to agree with Montagnon and Bouharmont’s postulation of a second center in southeastern Ethiopia.