The discovery of coffee is a story that has been passed down through the ages. It is said that the goat herder Kaldi first discovered the invigorating effects of the coffee bean in the ancient coffee forests on the Ethiopian plateau. From there, the French governor's wife gave him a bouquet of flowers with enough coffee seeds to start what is now a multi-billion dollar industry. The spread of coffee from Arabia Felix (present-day Yemen) to Mecca, Medina, Cairo, Damascus, Baghdad and Constantinople was documented in the Al-Jaziri manuscript.
It was then that Kaldi noticed some very energetic birds that had been eating the fruit of the bunn plant (known elsewhere as the coffee plant). In Kaffa, some people add melted ghee to brewed coffee to give it an extra flavor and make it nutritionally denser. Batangas and Lipa in the Philippines owe much of their wealth to coffee plantations in these areas, with Lipa eventually becoming known as the coffee capital of the Philippines. South India also started large-scale coffee cultivation, which still produces plants today.
The French ambassador managed to firmly establish the custom of drinking coffee among Parisians between July 1669 and May 1670. The earliest evidence of modern coffee consumption appears in Yemen since the mid-15th century in Sufi shrines, where coffee seeds were first roasted and brewed in a similar way to current methods. Abd al-Qadir al-Jaziri wrote a work that traced the history and legal controversies of coffee entitled Umdat al Safwa fi hill al-qahwa ر. The colloquial name of coffee, Java, comes from when most coffee in Europe and the United States was grown in Java.
This led to consumers rediscovering freshly roasted and ground coffee was better than pre-ground cans purchased at grocery stores. In 1672, an Armenian named Pascal established a coffee stand in Paris that was ultimately unsuccessful and it wasn't until 1689 when Procopio Cutò opened Café Procope that Paris had its first successful coffee shop. It was also then that instant coffee was commercially produced, thus increasing the demand for beans. A contemporary term for a person who makes coffee drinks, often a coffee shop employee, is barista.
