A Short History of Coffee ebook

Coffee isat least 1,000 years old. It was first mentioned in literature by Rhazes, afamous Arabian physician… The early Arabians called the bean and the tree thatbore it bunn; the drink, bunchum.

Our word“coffee” comes from the Arabic qahwah, through the Turkish kahveh,being originally one of the names employed for wine in Arabic. The word has noconnection with the town of Kaffa in Abyssinia, as many writers have supposed.Its final form in French became café; in German, kaffee. TheNorth American Indians knew it as kaufee.

Coffee wasfirst a food, then a wine, a medicine, and lastly a beverage. Its use as apopular beverage dates back 700 years...

The firstprinted reference to coffee appeared as chaubein Rauwolf’s Travels, published inGerman at Frankfort and Lauingen in 1582. Rauwolf was a German physician andbotanist, who made a journey to the Levant in 1573.

The firstauthentic account of the origin of coffee was written by the sheikAbd-al-Kadir, in an Arabian manuscript still preserved in the BibliothequeNationale at Paris.

The firstprinted reference to coffee in English appeared as chaoua in a note of Paludanus in Linschoten’s Travels, translated from the Dutch and published in London in 1598.