What Language Does Coffee Come From? (Solved & Explained!)

The word ‘coffee’ comes from the Dutch word ‘koffie’ and is believed to have come into the English language around 1582. However, coffee is so ancient that most of its origination history has simply been lost to time.  

While there is a lot of well-documented information regarding the crop, there are several different stories on how the second most exported crop in the world came to be. Continue reading on to learn more about coffee’s rich history. 

Early History of Coffee 

The most common legend about how the coffee bean came to be cherished is that it started with an Ethiopian goat herder named Kaldi. The story goes that the goat herder learned that his goats had started eating fruits from a strange tree and would go on to stay up all night long, unable to sleep. 

After sharing his findings with a local monastery, the local abbot reportedly drank the beans and was wired throughout his evening sermon. After that, the word spread about the energizing beans, and the story of coffee discovery was born. 

Coffee on The Arabian Peninsula 

The Arabian Peninsula was the birthplace of modern coffee cultivation and trading as it is recognized today. Coffee was grown in Yemeni Arabia by the 15th century, and by the 16th century, it was known in other parts of Arabia including Persia, Egypt, Syria, and Turkey. 

Coffee was consumed not just in homes, but also at the public coffee houses, known as qahveh khaneh, that began to sprout in cities throughout the Near East. The people in these areas went to coffee shops for different social activities and their popularity skyrocketed. 

Visitors to these coffee shops not only drank coffee and chatted, but also watched entertainers, listened to music, read the news, and played chess. These ancient coffee shops fast became an important spot to get information. 

Coffee Goes to Europe 

By the 17th century, travelers to Arabia were coming back to Europe with stories of a magical black drink. Different stories had arisen at this time, including the concept that the drink was from Satan himself. When the pope was asked to try the drink, he found it delicious enough to give a papal stamp of approval. 

Soon after the pope gave it the okay, coffee began to replace the popular breakfast beverages of the period, which was beer and wine. Instead of drinking alcohol, the people who drank coffee in the morning reported starting their day more alert and energized. Unsurprisingly, the quality of their work improved significantly as well. 

By the middle of the 17th century, over 300 coffee houses had been established in London alone. These shops attracted like-minded people such as merchants, shipping labor, artists, and brokers. Many businesses started to grow from these shops, like Lloyd’s of London. 

American Coffee  

Coffee came to what is now known as New York City around the turn of the 17th century. However, it wasn’t until 1773, when the American colonists started to rebel against the British, that the main beverage choice of tea was replaced with coffee. 

Coffee coming to the Americas was the first large boom for the coffee industry. Shortly after making its way to America, the drink spread like wildfire to the north and south, and coffee became globally renowned.  

What is Coffee? 

So what actually is coffee? Coffee is grown on a tree. Throughout the spring the coffee trees have small white flowers which turn into small green beans. Though these beans are technically seeds, they develop into what is commonly known as the coffee bean in the fall. They are then hand-picked and sorted by coffee farmers.  

The beans on the coffee tree ripen at different times. This means that while one tree might have a mix of unripened, green beans, another might be completely ripe and some may have a mix of not yet ripe green and ripened red beans.  

Having professional coffee pickers means that you can produce a quality cup of coffee by picking only the ripened beans. Cheap coffee is made from a blend of green and red beans that are all harvested by machine at the same time. 

Harvesting Coffee Beans 

Once the coffee beans have been picked, they need to dry out most of the moisture that is in the bean. To do this, beans are placed in the full sun to dry until they have less than 10% moisture. While the popular method is sun-drying, there are mechanical drying machines that take a fraction of the time to dry out the beans. 

Once the beans have been dried, they go through a hulling process. During the hulling process, the beans are stripped of their outer shell, leaving a green coffee bean inside. This is the part of the coffee bean that will be roasted to make a cup of java.  

Most coffee shops today will roast their beans in-house. This means that they will only get raw coffee beans from the farm and roast them with other flavorings, spices, and heat sources to produce different types of coffee. 

The resulting flavors can be spicy, smokey, earthy, or any combination of them. Different coffee beans will roast differently depending on the altitude and soil conditions that the beans were grown in. This is how so many different coffee varieties exist today. 

Fair Trade & Shade Grown Coffee Labels 

Modern coffee manufacturers will sometimes include 2 different labels in their coffee packaging. The first is the Fair Trade label. In most countries, this label indicates that the coffee meets certain criteria, such as being produced by farmers who are members of a democratically run cooperative, being produced without the use of child labor, having restrictions on the use of chemicals, and being paid a minimum and a price premium to the final exporter. 

The other label that is sometimes included on coffee packaging is a shade-grown label. This means that the specific coffee bean was grown on a farm, underneath a canopy of trees. This is different from growing coffee on farms in full sunlight because of the use of chemicals like pesticides. When coffee is grown in full sunlight, farmers will need to use pesticides more than shade-grown beans.