# From "The Hidden History of Beverages" by Alexander Lukashev

## 5. Goats, Sufis and Seven Beans: The Origin Stories of Coffee

Part One (history), chapter 5 of 14 · 2 footnotes to 2 sources
Page: https://herbalmind.bar/history/coffee-origin-stories/

Where the famous coffee origin stories come from, what coffee was before the roasted bean, and how Yemen lost its coffee monopoly.

Sections:
- **The Legend of the Dancing Goats and the Monk’s Epiphany** — the Kaldi legend, its first printed source, and what the documented record says
- **Coffee Before the Roasted Bean** — coffee as a food ration, and qishr, the drink brewed from the coffee husk
- **The Yemeni Monopoly** — how Yemen held the coffee trade through the port of Mocha
- **The Legend of Baba Budan: How the Monopoly Was Broken** — the story of seven smuggled beans, and how coffee actually left Yemen

Questions this chapter answers:
- Where and when was the Kaldi legend first printed, and was the goatherd Ethiopian?
  Short answer: In Rome in 1671, in Antoine Faustus Nairon’s treatise on coffee; there the herder has no name and lives in Yemen — the name Kaldi and Ethiopia were added later.
- When and where is coffee as a drink first documented?
  Short answer: In fifteenth-century Yemen, among Sufis who drank it to stay awake through their night devotions.
- What did people make from coffee before they roasted the beans?
  Short answer: Oromo balls of crushed cherry and animal fat, a ration rather than a drink, and Yemeni qishr, brewed from the dried husks.
- Did Baba Budan really break the Yemeni coffee monopoly?
  Short answer: The story of seven beans in a beard may be true, but coffee left Yemen by many routes over many decades — Dutch Ceylon and Java, French plants in the Caribbean, pilgrims and merchants.

Short answers only. The full account, with its sources, is in chapter 5 of the book — https://books.apple.com/book/id6756108723

Sources:
- Naironus, Faustus (Antonio Fausto Naironi). De saluberrima potione cahue seu cafe nuncupata discursus. Rome, 1671.
- Hattox, Ralph S. Coffee and Coffeehouses: The Origins of a Social Beverage in the Medieval Near East. Near Eastern Studies 3. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1985.

Free to read: this chapter is free on https://herbalmind.bar/history/coffee-origin-stories/ (it is also in the free Apple Books sample — https://books.apple.com/book/id6756108723)

## Chapter 5, free to read

Coffee has one of the best-known origin stories of any drink: the Ethiopian goatherd Kaldi and his dancing goats. The story has an author and a date, and this chapter starts with them.

### The Legend of the Dancing Goats and the Monk’s Epiphany

The core of this story is not Ethiopian, not ancient and not oral. Its first appearance in print is Rome, 1671, in one of the earliest European treatises on coffee, written by Antoine Faustus Nairon, a Maronite professor of Oriental languages.[^naironus1671] Later retellings set the story in the ninth century, eight hundred years before Nairon. In Nairon’s version the herder still has no name, and he is not in Ethiopia at all, but in the Kingdom of Ayaman, which is to say Yemen — the name “Kaldi” and the Ethiopian setting were added later, over three centuries of retelling.

So the “ancient Ethiopian legend of Kaldi” is, at root, a goat story assembled in Rome in 1671 and completed with a name, a country and an air of antiquity by later retellers. Keep that in mind for the rest of this book: it is a small, clean example of the thing we will meet again and again — a convenient story, assembled late, that displaces whatever was there before.

With that said, here is the legend as it is now told.

A goatherd named Kaldi, somewhere in the ninth century, notices that his animals will not settle after eating the red berries of a wild bush.

Intrigued, he gathers the berries and carries them to the nearest religious house, where the brothers keep long night vigils. (In most retellings this is a Sufi lodge — an anachronism, since Sufi coffee drinking belongs to fifteenth-century Yemen, not ninth-century Ethiopia, but the detail has become part of the story.) The elder sheikh takes the unfamiliar fruits for a devilish temptation and throws them into the fire — and the house fills with the smell of roasting beans.

The brothers, drawn by the scent, rake them from the embers, crush them and pour hot water over them. The drink is dark and bitter, and it keeps sleep off: they can pray the night through with their minds clear. That, in the legend, is the first cup of coffee.

Over time, knowledge of qahwa — the Arabic name, which gave Turkish kahve, Italian caffè and every European word for the drink — spread throughout the Islamic world, and from there to Europe and beyond.

Late invention though it is, on one point it agrees with the record: the first documented mention of coffee as a beverage dates to the fifteenth century, in Yemen, among Sufis who drank it to stay awake through their night devotions.[^hattox1985]

### Coffee Before the Roasted Bean

- Balls of cherry and fat — Oromo preparations mixed crushed coffee cherries with animal fat into a portable, energy-dense food. This is coffee as a ration rather than as a drink, and it is usually taken to predate brewing.
- Qishr — Yemenis brewed the dried husks of the cherry with ginger, and sometimes cinnamon or cardamom, into a fruity, lightly caffeinated infusion. Qishr needs no roasting, and it is simple and cheap, which is why it spread; it is still poured for guests today. It is the nearest thing in this chapter to the second half of this book: the cup you reach for when you do not want coffee, though qishr still carries a little caffeine.

Of the two, only qishr can be reproduced today without difficulty: dried coffee cherry husks are sold as cascara, and Chapter 11 describes what has happened to them lately. Steep a tablespoon in hot water for five minutes with a slice of ginger. It tastes of dried fruit and hibiscus rather than of coffee, and it is a drink some five hundred years old that you can make tonight.

### The Yemeni Monopoly

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries nearly all the coffee in trade grew on the mountain terraces of Yemen and left through the port of Mocha (al-Makha). The merchants who held that trade had every reason to keep it: if live seed got out, anyone with a colony could grow their own.

The answer, as the story is usually told, was to heat every bean before it left the country, by boiling or roasting. It could no longer sprout, but that did not stand in the way of brewing it.

### The Legend of Baba Budan: How the Monopoly Was Broken

The monopoly broke anyway. The story usually told is that of Baba Budan, a pilgrim returning from Mecca through Yemen in the seventeenth century with seven fertile beans hidden in his beard, which he planted in the hills of Mysore. Hills in Karnataka carry his name, and coffee has grown there for a very long time.

But this chapter opened by taking apart one tidy origin story, and here is a second one with the same shape: a single named individual, a single decisive act, a round number of beans. It may be true. It is also the kind of story that gets assembled afterward to explain a diffuse process: coffee left Yemen by many routes over many decades — Dutch cultivation in Ceylon and Java, French plants in the Caribbean, seeds moving with pilgrims and merchants in numbers nobody counted.

The world now drinks something over two billion cups a day. It did not start with goats, and it probably did not start with seven beans in a beard.

[^naironus1671]: Naironus, 1671.
[^hattox1985]: Hattox, 1985, 22–28.

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