I have updated my previous published coffee article and thought I would share!
Due to some (fairly harmless) addictions to chocolate too, I also wrote a small article on the history of chocolate & how to make it in the period style.
They are both pdf documents. Enjoy!
For those who are having trouble, try the .odt & .doc documents.
I did a small talk over the weekend about coffee history. I thought people might like to download it and peruse it in their own time!
In another format-
Hope you like it.
There is a coffee page, with some of this information already on it. Please forgive any repetition, as all information is needed for a full story…
The very first mention of coffee beans are from Ibn Sina or Avicenna. In his work called the “Al-Qanun fi al-tib”, the bunn, when brewed into bunchum from Yemen “revives the body, cleans the skin, and dries up the humidities that are under it, and gives an excellent smell to all the body”. This same opinion had also been held by Al-Razi, who wrote his works of medicine in the 10th century. However, some of the first coffee plantations were started in Yemen, in the 13th century. It was known to have been used by Sufi mystics in Yemen in the 13th century, specifically the order set up by Abu al-Hasan al-Shadhili (known as the Shadhili).
O Coffee, thou dost dispel all care, thou art the object of desire to the scholar
Anon Arabic poem, 1511.
Shihab Al-Din Ibn ‘Abd al-Ghaffar, writing in 1532, reported that Yemeni students were using qahwa to study in the Al-Azhar Medrassa. A scholar named Abd-al-Qadir ibn Muhammed al-Ansari al-Jaziri al-Hanbali wrote a treatise called “Umdat Al-Safwa, Argument in Favor of the Legitimate Use of Coffee” in 1558, highlighting the arguments on morality and religion that plagued coffee and coffee houses.
Coffee was banned in Mecca in 1511 by the Governor, Khayr Bey. Specifically in public and in groups. The ban would be unable to be enforced in the privacy of the home. All coffee shops were closed and stock confiscated. The next year the Caliph of Cairo over-ruled the Governor and he was put to death for embezzlement. With the Mamluk empire falling to the Ottomans in 1517, coffee quickly spread over the rest of the Middle East, with the Ottoman historian İbrahim Peçevi writing-
Until the year 962 [1555], in the High, God-Guarded city of Constantinople, as well as in Ottoman lands generally, coffee and coffee-houses did not exist. About that year, a fellow called Hakam from Aleppo and a wag called Shams from Damascus came to the city; they each opened a large shop in the district called Tahtakale, and began to purvey coffee.
By 1530, Damascus had coffee shops. In 1524, coffee shops were closed down in Mecca, only allowing private consumption of coffee. This was overturned a year later with heavily licensed shops allowed. In 1539, the coffee shops in Cairo were raided and closed down, which lasted all of a week. After much prohibitions and allowances, it was eventually settled that coffee shops pay a high tax and have a mullah sit and preach in the coffee shops. There by distracting people away from political thoughts (which would lead to unrest) and toward religion.
The first European mention of coffee was in the works of German doctor Leonhard Rauwolf who wrote-
A very good drink they call Chaube that is almost as black as ink and very good in illness, especially of the stomach. This they drink in the morning early in the open places before everybody, without any fear or regard, out of clay or China cups, as hot as they can, sipping a little at a time.
For some reason, coffee was called chaube. It was written in 1585.
The French traveler Jean Chardin wrote in the 17th century of his travels to Persia. There is also mention of coffee shops and what he experienced in them-
People engage in conversation, for it is there that news is communicated and where those interested in politics criticize the government in all freedom and without being fearful, since the government does not heed what the people say. Innocent games… resembling checkers, hopscotch, and chess, are played. In addition, mollas, dervishes, and poets take turns telling stories in verse or in prose. The narrations by the mollas and the dervishes are moral lessons, like our sermons, but it is not considered scandalous not to pay attention to them. No one is forced to give up his game or his conversation because of it. A molla will stand up in the middle, or at one end of the qahveh-khaneh, and begin to preach in a loud voice, or a dervish enters all of a sudden, and chastises the assembled on the vanity of the world and its material goods. It often happens that two or three people talk at the same time, one on one side, the other on the opposite, and sometimes one will be a preacher and the other a storyteller.
Venetian traders brought coffee to Europe in 1615, five years after tea. Coffee houses ended up playing the same role of social gathering and political unrest that it started as in the Middle East.
Bibliography
Coffee History / Pre-1600 on the Espresso Coffee Guide.
Wine In Arabia—1 by Paul Lunde. From Saudi Aramco World.
Wine Of Arabia—2 by Jon Mandaville. From Saudi Aramco World.
Yemen’s Well-Traveled Bean by Eric Hansen. From Saudi Aramco World.
Ethiopian Coffee on Selamta, The In-Flight Magazine of
Ethiopian Airlines.
The Coffee Route from Yemen to London 10th-17th Centuries by Dr Rabah Saoud. From MuslimHeritage.com.
Coffee — The Wine of Islam.
Coffee, Coffeehouses and the Nocturnal Rituals of Early Modern Jewry by Elliot Horowitz. Jstor article on Google Docs.
Coffee in Safavid Iran: Commerce and Consumption by Rudi Matthee. JSTOR article.
Since there is very likely to be a K&Q visit in December for the William Marshal Memorial Feast, I was told it would be a Good Thing to have a small gift from the Guild. I have thought of making something, but since I was considering making Fatimid garb (the same time period as William the Marshal) as well as making more garb for my kids, I thought the best thing would be the very well known coffee.
Coffee has a lot of fanciful stories floating around about it but are hard to believe. Many of them date to a much later period, such as the dancing goat story which can only be dated to 1671. However, it is known that coffee spread from Ethiopia to Yemen and Egypt very quickly. Coffea arabica is a native to Ethiopia and the Sudan. Coffea canephora (or Robusta) is native to central Africa. Robusta has a bigger yield to arabica, having more caffeine per gram but is more bitter in flavour. Therefor it was considered the poorer cousin.
Coffee houses opened in Mecca, the holy city between 1512 and 1524. The drinking of coffee was banned, until the local sheik became a drinker and the bans were then lifted. This happened all over the Islam world, recurring in Damascus in 1530, the first coffee house opening in Constantinople in 1553 and coffee stores being sacked in Cairo in 1532 after another ban had been put on the drink. A lot of this can be found on the coffee page, if anyone is interested…
Coffee was thought to have been taken to Europe for wholesale consumption by Venetian traders. However, the coffee we drink today has changed considerably from the one people drank 500 years ago. Today there is powdered coffee as well as a huge range of blended coffee. If I wish to give a more medieval type coffee bean, I must go for a single origin coffee.
The port of Moka in Yemen was one of the biggest exporters of coffee, considered the best in the world. So I have been looking at coffee wholesalers in Australia, such as Jaspers Coffee and the Coffee Company. Specifically tracing single origin coffee from Ethiopia or Yemen. Maybe regular beans, although there are peaberries to consider as well. The coffee bean develops like a peanut, with nuts together in the fruit. A peaberry is a single nut. Peaberries occur when there is less nitrogen in the soil. Considered by some to have the flavour of two beans in one. So I will shop a couple of days before. Should I get them ground or leave them whole? Europeans grind their coffee but it is pulverized in the Middle East, creating a fine powder (which can then be mixed with spices such as cardamom).
Coffee: Its History, Cultivation, and Uses by Robert Hewitt is available to read from Google Books.
Miriam's Middle Eastern Research Blog 