Coffee is an amazing drink. It wakes people up in the morning and drives international economics. Yet very little is known about its origins, perhaps because early traders did not want to divulge too many secrets about their prized export to outsiders. Several fascinating myths about its discovery and proliferation exist, and whether they obscure the truth or fill-in historical gaps is unclear. What follows are the myths and early history of coffee as well as a description of caffeine and its affects on the body and mind. For a drink most of us take for granted, coffee influences our culture and our biochemistry in a number of surprising ways.
According to a story told by Hadjiji Khalifa, Ali bin Omar al-Shadhili, the Islamic saint of al-Mukha, was recognized in the court of an Ethiopian king for his powers as a healer. The king’s daughter stayed with al-Shadhili for a time in order to receive treatment for an unknown illness. After a while the king suspected that they were doing more than treating illness and the healer was banished across the Red Sea to the mountains of Yemen. His followers followed, as followers do, and they set up a kind of monastery. With limited supplies they turned to the wilderness to sustain them, eating the bright red berries of an unknown tree. The fruit was energizing, and they began to drink a decoction made from the boiled berries. Meanwhile, the citizens of Ethiopia were plagued by an epidemic marked by severe itching. Some of the afflicted sought al-Shadhili in his remote mountain exile for a cure. He gave them coffee and they suddenly stopped itching. “This won him an honorable return,” writes Claudia Roden in Coffee: A Connoisseur’s Companion, “and gave him the position of patron saint of coffee growers, coffee house keepers, and coffee drinkers.” To this day, coffee is known by the word “shadhiliye” in Algeria to honor the saint’s discovery.
By far, the most popular legend is about an Ethiopian goatherd named Kaldi. There are many variations of the story based on this mythic figure, but they are all fairly consistent. The following is a synthesis of the various accounts I have come across. As the author of Uncommon Grounds, Mark Pendergrast, puts it, Kaldi was “a poet by nature. The job required little of him, so he was free to make up songs and to play his pipe.” At night he would play a piercingly high note to call his flock back to him. One day his goats failed to respond to the call and Kaldi freaked out. He dashed into the surrounding woods to find them. After a lengthy search he heard his goats rustling in the distance. “The goats were running about, butting one another, dancing on their hind legs, and bleating excitedly.” It was no easy task, but the young Kaldi eventually gathered them up and reluctantly lead them back home. Were his goats poisoned, he thought, or possessed by evil spirits that bewitched them into performing their bizarre bacchanalia? In either case, his father was definitely going to kill him if he found out. When he took them out to graze the next day the goats ran off to the spot with the berries and took to dancing once again.
Kaldi was a poet and musician and his curiosity took hold of him despite his father’s “Just Say No” attitude. He tried the leaves of the plant his goats were eating and immediately felt his tongue start tingling. The leaves were bitter, so he tried the red berries. They were sweet, and the tingling moved out from his tongue to his stomach and then to the rest of his body. Soon after he was dancing and frolicking along with his goats in the forest. “He felt that he would never be tired or grouchy again.” When it came time to return home he gathered some coffee berries for his family to try. His brothers tried them, then his father, and soon everyone was ecstatic about Kaldi’s discovery. In Roden’s version it is a Muslim monk who tries the berries before Kaldi’s family, an interesting Islamic twist considering that Ethiopia (then Abyssinia) was predominately Judeo-Christian.
These myths tell us more about people’s attitudes toward coffee than of the early cultivation of the stimulating bean. While they may or may not be true, it is unlikely that coffee was discovered by rambunctious goats or used as a tonic to thwart an itching epidemic. These myths act as substitutes for a verifiable early history of a plant that, within a matter of a few centuries, has spread all over the world as one of the most widely traded and consumed organic commodities of all time. In his book Psyche Delicacies, Chris Kilham writes that, “Coffee today is more widely consumed than wheat, corn, or rice and more widely traded than steel.” Despite its modern popularity, coffee was unknown to the great civilizations of antiquity. Neither the Greeks, the Romans, the Egyptians, or the people of Timbuktu left any recorded interaction with coffee as either a species of plant or as a beverage.
It is estimated that coffee was first cultivated around 575 AD. Although coffee is native to Africa, some scholars believe it was the Yemeni Arabs who were the first coffee farmers, planting their crops in the mountainous Southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula. Others maintain that cultivation started in Harar, Ethiopia, an area still known for its excellent beans. “It is possible that when the Ethiopians invaded and ruled Yemen for some fifty years in the sixth century, they deliberately set up coffee plantations” writes Mark Pendergrast. The first person to write about coffee was an Arabian Muslim physician and astronomer in the tenth century named Abu Bakr Muhammad ibn Zakariya El Razi, or “Rhazes” for short. He introduced coffee to the world with the following description: “Bunchum is hot and dry and very good for the stomach.” In Rhazes’ time the drink made from coffee was known as bunchum and the plant was called bunn, a word some may recognize today as the name of a manufacturer of professional brewing equipment.
Coffee was used medicinally at first, usually in a religious context. Sufi monks used coffee to pep-up their midnight prayers. Even the Prophet Mohammed enjoyed coffee, saying the drink was so invigorating that he could “unhorse forty men and possess forty women” while under its influence. The word we use today comes from the Arabic word qahwah, “originally a poetic name for wine” according to Claudia Roden. Muslims praised coffee as a substitute for wine, which is forbidden in the Qur’an. Coffeehouses started popping up all over the Muslim world, where men would gather and, under the energizing influence of their strong coffee, engage in intellectual discourse. With the rise of coffee-exclusive establishments the beverage came into conflict with religion. Instead of aiding worship and scriptural study, coffee became a medium of secular distraction. “The more they frequented the coffee houses, the less they went to the mosques.” Ralph Hattox, cited by Mark Pendergrast, wrote in his history of Arab coffeehouses that “the patrons of the coffeehouse indulged in a variety of improper pastimes ranging from gambling to involvement in irregular and criminally unorthodox sexual situations.”
“Coffee became a subversive drink,” writes Claudia Roden, “gathering people together and sharpening their wits, encouraging political arguments and revolt—a characteristic which was to follow it into Europe and which was felt particularly in times of social unrest.” Some Islamic leaders tried to apply laws from the Qur’an that prohibited wine to coffee with limited success. The governor of the holy city Mecca, Khair-Beg, discovered that people were writing satirical poems about him in coffeehouses. He turned to the Surahs in reaction, citing verses that ban the consumption of wine as adequate to prohibit coffee-drinking as well. In 1511 the coffeehouses of Mecca were shutdown. “The ban lasted only until the Cairo sultan, a habitual coffee drinker, heard about it and reversed the edict.” In 1656 the Ottoman Grand Vizier Koprili shut-down coffeehouses and punished all who made or drank coffee, even if they did so in their homes. If caught, the offender would be cudgeled. If caught again the coffee-drinker would be sewn into a leather bag and thrown into the Bosporus strait. Coffee remained popular enough that many people died in this way.
As coffee moved into Europe as a result of increased Arab trading and the rise of Ottoman might, the Christian world reacted in much the same way as the Arab and Islamic world. Pope Clement VIII was approached by a group of bishops who felt that coffee threatened all of Christendom. They argued that Satan gave the Muslims coffee as an unholy alternative to wine, which they couldn’t drink because it was used in Holy Communion. As such, they deemed coffee as a spiritual poison unfit for the devout. In a manner similar to the sultan of Cairo, Pope Clement VIII replied, “Why, this Satan’s drink is so delicious that it would be a pity to let the infidels have exclusive use of it. We shall cheat Satan by baptizing it.” The Council of Ten in Venice attempted to contradict the pope’s assessment with little result. And Frederick the Great of Germany, like the Grand Vizier Koprili, severely punished any who traded, roasted, or consumed coffee within his domain. Only a few government establishments were allowed to prepare coffee. Secret agents known pejoratively as “Coffee Smellers” sniffed out consumers of the contraband concoction and threw them before the courts.
Despite the religious and political persecution of coffee, people kept drinking it. It was irrepressible. Everywhere coffee went it changed its host societies, altering their customs and rituals, simultaneously sobering and intoxicating whole populations. How could a bitter black drink that was only just discovered relatively recently, the facts of which are shrouded in mystery, challenge both the institutions of God and Man? What about this plant makes it so commercially successful that the economies of several currently developing countries depend almost solely on its cultivation? It is the presence of caffeine, a naturally occurring chemical compound found in coffee, tea, and chocolate.
The very second you take a sip of your coffee the caffeine begins to enter your bloodstream. Caffeine is fat-soluble; there isn’t a single cell in the human body that can resist its entry. As you swallow it enters through your esophagus and then the stomach, but it’s in the small intestine that the majority of absorption takes place. Dr. Cynthia Kuhn, Ph.D. and the coauthors of Buzzed write that, “Once it reaches the intestines, virtually all of the caffeine that was ingested is absorbed.” Within thirty to sixty minutes the caffeine from your coffee has gained admittance to every organ in your body. In The Caffeine Advantage Bennet Alan Weinberg and Bonnie K. Bealer report that, “Because there is no significant physiological barrier that hinders its passage through tissue, the concentrations attained by caffeine are virtually the same throughout the body and in blood, saliva, and even breast milk and semen.”
Due to caffeine’s chemical structure it can easily penetrate the blood-brain barrier, “a defensive mechanism that protects the CNS [Central Nervous System] from biological or chemical exposure by preventing viruses and other large (and most small) molecules from entering the brain or its surrounding fluid.” Most of the drugs we use have difficulty passing through to the blood-brain barrier or fail outright. “However, caffeine passes through the blood-brain barrier as if it did not exist.” Once inside, caffeine follows “the dopaminergic pathway in the brain, thereby enhancing mood” as Chris Kilham writes. Caffeine is a member of a class of compounds called xanthines that inhibits the uptake of adenosine, a hormone that occurs as a byproduct of metabolism that affects nearly every system in the body. Adenosine slows things down, “so, as neurons become more active, they produce more adenosine, and this provides a ‘brake’ on all the neural activity—an ingenious self-regulation by the brain” writes Dr. Kuhn. Since adenosine is produced all over the body it has a “braking” action in each of our organs. For example, when caffeine blocks the uptake of adenosine in the kidneys the resulting effect is increased urine production, or what I used to call in high school The One Cup Rule: one trip to the restroom for every cup of coffee consumed.
I thought this was a pretty funny observation, and caffeine may have had an influence on why I did. When adenosine is blocked in the brain it allows a number of other neurotransmitters to become active. Caffeine’s inhibition of adenosine indirectly increases dopamine, which improves mood and prevents mental degeneration; acetylcholine, which increases muscular activity and long-term memory; and serotonin, which relieves depression and makes us feel relaxed but alert. Free from the slow-motion affect of adenosine, these chemicals make us feel happier, allowing us to enjoy ourselves and those around us more fully, including jokes about urinary nomenclature.
Caffeine also enhances the senses, especially touch and sight. The thalamus, writes Bonnie Bealer, is “a mass of nerve cells centrally located in the brain just below the cerebrum and resembling a large egg in size and shape.” This is where the brain receives sensory impulses and relays them to the cerebral cortex. “It is an important center of integration, allowing sensory information to evoke physical reactions and affect emotions.” Through the adenosine-blocking action of caffeine in this egg-shaped bundle of nervous tissue our ability to discern colors and visual cues improves, our hearing becomes more acute, and our skin becomes more sensitive to touch. It also affects how we feel about what we feel.
Caffeine shares many of its effects with antidepressants such as Zoloft, Welbutrin, and Prozac because they all work at balancing serotonin levels. Caffeine, unlike prescription drugs, has no known serious side-effects. Commercials for antidepressants spend more time listing the drugs’ potential harm on users than on the positive effects. The most common caveat concerning caffeine is that late-night consumption can inhibit the onset of a goodnight’s sleep, or that too much will make you jittery. In fact, despite its potency, caffeine is relatively harmless. Chris Kilham writes that “the human lethal dose of caffeine is approximately 10 grams, equal to roughly sixty-six 5-ounce cups of strong coffee.” It only takes 65mg to start feeling better, half of the amount in a normal cup of coffee. Doses as low as this have even been proven as effective in the treatment of clinical depression. In 1993, the Kaiser Permanente Medical Care Program studied almost 130,000 people and “found that the risk of suicide decreased as caffeine consumption increased.”
Under the direction of Arthur Klatsky, a cardiologist, the study tracked northern California residents, including the records of 4,500 who died during research, and found a statistically lower rate of suicide among coffee drinkers than among coffee abstainers. …The study was very large, involved a multiracial population of men and women, and examined many factors related to mortality, such as alcohol consumption and smoking
In a manner of speaking, coffee increases your life-expectancy because you won’t feel like killing yourself if you drink it once in a while.
It seems ironic to me that Americans take coffee, and its active ingredient caffeine, for granted. As a country, we are skeptical and sometimes outright fearful of any substance that alters our physical or mental chemistry if it hasn’t been approved by the FDA and neatly packaged by a pharmaceutical company. We give intense scrutiny to new laboratory drugs and wage “war” on the ones grown in Colombia and the hidden fields of Kentucky. And yet we don’t have a clue when or even where coffee was discovered. People line up at Starbucks like addicts at a methadone clinic. If not for caffeine, the giant coffee chain couldn’t sustain multiple locations on a single city block the way that it does. It’s doubtful that most of these people know just how caffeine affects them, or how much is in their favorite drink. They know it tastes good and that it lifts them up. This blend of naiveté and innocence isn’t necessarily bad, but it is interesting to consider when comparing American attitudes to coffee with cannabis, which has been used all throughout human history for a wider range of uses than coffee, and whose psychoactive agent, THC, has been more often studied by federal and private researchers than caffeine.
As a coffee-dependent society, I think it’s important that we try to learn more about our favorite beverage so that we can use it to better advantage. I find myself enjoying coffee differently since beginning the research for this article. I used to drink it all day, even pulling shots of espresso well past midnight. I’ve realized that what I thought was chronic insomnia was actually just over-caffeination. This may have seemed obvious to everyone else, but it’s somewhat embarrassing to admit that it didn’t occur to me that caffeine was to blame until very recently. Perhaps my insistence that coffee’s relationship to caffeine was minimal stemmed from an older set of ideas I had about drugs and other mind-altering substances, all of which were very conservative and based on righteous paranoia. I thought that drugs took control away from those who used them, and loss of control was loss of identity, and subjectivity, itself. I came up with all of this while under the influence of gallons of coffee consumed for hours and hours at cafés in high school. I believe it is simply testament to the powers of caffeine to improve brain function and elevate mood, as I probably wouldn’t have come up with this stuff, or believed so passionately in my conclusions, without it.
previously in 'Pocket' 1, 2005
(written summer, 2004)
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© 2006 Damion Armentrout. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.