by Robert Evans
Each of these stories is about as likely (and unlikely) as the other, but regardless of how that first cup came about, worship and coffee have been inextricably linked since the beginning. While the “wakeful monastery” is a popular story, it’s almost guaranteed that the first holy men to cultivate a caffeine addiction were Sufi. The first historical evidence of coffee use dates back to the late fifteenth century, as a “devotional aid” in Sufi dhikr ceremonies.
These rituals were performed at night, and the longer one could keep up the worshipping, the better God liked it. Coffee did for those Sufis what it’s done for generations of college students. By the early seventeenth century, coffee use had evolved into an actual part of the worship itself. Followers of Sheikh Ikhlas Khalwati would go on a khalwa, or retreat, every winter, and spend three days fasting and drinking nothing but coffee. Aside from the ulcers they all surely earned, the coffee allowed them to dhikr all night and pray well into the mornings.
HOW TO: Re-create the Grandfather of All Coffee
While the three stories in the previous section are all fun bits of myth, it’s unlikely any of them accurately depicts the first beverage made with coffee beans. In truth, it was very probably a beverage called quishir: tea made with dried coffee cherries and husks. It’s still used in Ethiopia and Yemen today, and that should tell you most of what you need to know about coffee’s journey into the Arab world.
Ethiopia, the birthplace of coffee, is separated from Yemen only by the narrow Gulf of Aden. Coffee almost certainly made its way to the Middle East over this tiny gulf, and the first real cup of qahwa al-arabiya (Arabic coffee) was almost certainly quishir.
Ingredients
2–3 tablespoons dried coffee cherries and husks
2 cups boiling water
Directions
The good people at Counter Culture Coffee used to sell a product, “Cascara,” that was made from dried coffee cherries and husks and meant to be brewed as tea. (They stopped selling it in December 2015 and currently note that it is “impossible” to find.) You can find a few recipes online, but they all generally advise between two to three tablespoons of the grounds per eight- to ten-ounce cup. It wasn’t an exact science back in ancient Ethiopia, and I recommend eyeballing it rather than measuring too carefully.
Start by filling your cup about one-fifth of the way with the dried cherries/husks, and then pour boiling (or simmering) water over the whole mixture. Let it steep for a few minutes until it turns a rich, burnt amber shade. Then you can either filter out the grounds or, if you’re a real drug historian, drink it dirty. (The boiled coffee cherries actually taste quite good.) The tea itself is a slightly sweet, slightly sour brew, with a very mildly unpleasant aftertaste and a nice little caffeine buzz.
Tracing Back the Ur-Coffee
The city of Mocha, where all our apocryphal Omars invented their first mythic cups of coffee, is located in coastal Yemen. It would’ve been one of the first places in the Arabian Peninsula whose residents enjoyed quishir. And it’s as likely a birthplace as any for the first cup of recognizable coffee.
Quishir’s first descendant was another Ethiopian brew, bounya, made with raw crushed and boiled coffee beans. You drink all the liquid—it tasted faintly of pea soup when I made it—and then eat the beans, which will be chewy by the time you’re done boiling them. I don’t recommend either the beverage or the boiled beans. But bounya got me to thinking about how the First Coffee might have tasted. The tale of the second Omar from earlier in the chapter—the dervish who roasted and then boiled his coffee beans—sounded like it could be the missing link between bounya and coffee.
I decided to try it.
HOW TO: Make the First Coffee
Ingredients
1 cup green coffee beans
Cast-iron skillet, clean
Saucepan, filled with water
Directions
First, I set my green coffee beans on a skillet and fried them slowly on medium heat, until they were a rich golden brown, tending toward black on some edges. Once I’d been at it for ten minutes or so, which seemed like as long as a starving, mountain-dwelling dervish would be willing to wait, I tried to eat one of the beans. It was hard, partly crunchy, and partly chewy. Then I took a mortar and pestle and ground the beans up as best I could; only about half of them crumbled well.
I dumped the lot of it into the saucepan and boiled it for another ten minutes, until the water reached a light caramel color. I drank the First Coffee with my friend Brandon, who agreed that it was “not the best coffee I’ve ever had, but also not the worst.” It didn’t have the inky black thickness of espresso, and there was a burnt tinge to the taste that wasn’t exactly delightful, but it worked: I felt the jolt I crave when I brew a cup of coffee, and the partly cooked, boiled beans in the bottom tasted . . . well, not good. But I imagine they’d have been downright delicious if I were a starving, exiled, lonely hermit in a cave.
And the caffeine high—that would’ve been a revelation. It’s easy to understand the ecstatic reaction to coffee by its early drinkers when you assume they were all (A) total lightweights and (B) probably starving when they had their first cup. Caffeine is a mild drug, but it’s still a drug. There’s a reason every myth specifies that its inventor was malnourished and dying at the time. Someone in that state would’ve been hit a lot harder by a dose of caffeine.
Understanding early coffee’s effect on its first generation of drinkers is key to understanding what came next . . .
The Bloody Persecution of Coffee
Muslims are forbidden from drinking alcohol. Coffee, on the other hand, isn’t explicitly forbidden in the Quran, and in lieu of any other drugs it apparently hit the spot. As a result, java came to be known as “the Wine of Islam.” Since wine itself was even more forbidden in the Muslim world than it is in Salt Lake City, it’s not terribly surprising that coffee soon ran afoul of the religious authorities.
The first explicit condemnation of coffee via holy men came in 1511 CE, less than a century after coffee first percolated its way into the Muslim world. Religious scholars in Mecca hated that people were *gasp* consuming coffee for pleasure, rather than just to keep themselves awake during wild late-night worship sessions. Coffee’s delicious flavor had stabbed it right in the cup. In 1511 a Mamluk pasha named Khair Beg or Kha’ir Bey (no one in the past could agree on how to spell names) became the first world leader to officially ban coffee.
Beg/Bey was the governor of Mecca at the time, and he has to come down as one of the wettest blankets on the damp bathroom floor of history. Depending on which account you read, he either saw a bunch of folks hanging around outside a coffeehouse and just assumed they were plotting violent rebellion, or he came across a dirty limerick about himself on the ancient equivalent of a bathroom wall* (*also a bathroom wall). Whatever it was, Khair Beg was convinced of coffee’s evil and immediately set to having his goons burn all the beans they could find.
This first ban didn’t last long. The sultan, Khair’s boss, loved coffee, and he quickly vetoed Mecca’s coffeehouses back open. He did request that patrons “behave decorously,” in the fragile hope that doing so would keep coffee off the radar of his empire’s fun-hatingest clerics. It didn’t work for long: Despite the sultan’s love for it, and the fact that the Turkish word for breakfast was now kahvalti (literally: “before coffee”), the baby version of intoxication offered by coffee was just too much for the fundamentalists of the day.
By 1535 the coffee hate in Mecca had reached such a fever pitch that mobs of anticoffee protestors, amped up by an angry preacher, ran wild through the city streets burning down coffeehouses. I can only presume the resulting fires smelled absolutely delicious. In fact, all the coffee burnings of the sixteenth century were probably a welcome respite from the normal smells of a city in the days before people figured out how to do things like “dispose of sewage” and “bury corpses promptly
” on a macro level.
The coffee-loving people of Mecca were drawn out onto the streets by this delicious-smelling act of vandalism, and they quickly set to protecting their fix. Soon there was straight-up warfare in the streets of Islam’s holiest city. The conflict didn’t stop until the government issued a proclamation reconfirming the legality of coffee. Peace (and the sanctity of many Muslims’ morning routine) was restored . . . for a while. But the forces of coffee prohibition weren’t done yet.
Coffee’s legality and social acceptability ebbed and flowed over the next century. The last truly serious banning of the beverage came in the early seventeenth century, during the reign of our old friend Murad IV. While Murad was busy pretending to be a cigarette smoker so he could chop people’s damn heads off, one of his subordinates decided that coffee shops were also a dire threat to public morals.
Back in those days, sultans, like Murad, had grand viziers who handled a lot of the critical dictatoring and war-winning work that the sultan just didn’t have time for. It turns out dedicating thousands of hours to entrapping and murdering smokers doesn’t leave a lot of time for basic governance. Late in Murad’s reign a guy named Kuprili was the grand vizier, and so it fell on him to fight a war while his boss was busy fighting secondhand smoke.
The war wasn’t popular, in the way wars so often aren’t, and Grand Vizier Kuprili started to worry that his enemies might use the empire’s coffee shops against him. At that time coffeehouses were places where members of the intelligentsia would gather to discuss pertinent issues of the day and, maybe, come to some very negative conclusions about their government. Rather than risk any sedition, Kuprili decided to straight-up ban the consumption of coffee within the empire. I’ll let our (century-)old friend All about Coffee describe his punishment for violations of the new ordinance:
For a first violation of the order, cudgeling was the punishment; for a second offense, the victim was sewn in a leather bag and thrown into the Bosporus.
You’ll have to decide for yourself whether or not the “beheading” risked by Ottoman tobacco smokers was a worse punishment than being sewn into a goddamn bag and drowned. But I think everyone reading this book can agree that a life apart from sweet, sweet coffee is a worse fate than either. Wherever you land, Kuprili’s prohibition was short-lived, and most of the major coffee bans in the Muslim world were over by the middle of the sixteenth century. But that didn’t mean it was a free and clear world for the inky black Meth Lite we all know and love today.
The Christian world (a.k.a. “Europe”) was enticed by the idea of a delicious black tea that keeps you awake all night. But they knew just enough about coffee’s origins to realize that it was a Muslim brew. And Muslim was basically a synonym for soul-reaving evil for the good Christian folk of the time. Booze, and falling asleep to the sound of your own vomit, was acceptable to the Lord. But the Wine of Islam? That shit was straightaway sketchy, and it was going to take a lot for the average European to get over coffee’s uncomfortably foreign origins.
Luckily for all manner of early waking Christians, coffee gained a God-friendly fan in Pope Clement VIII (1536–1605). While other European leaders like Frederick the Great flirted with temporary bans of coffee on the grounds (HAHAHA!) that it might hurt beer sales/public morality, Clement took to the brew like a pope takes to . . . I don’t know how to finish that joke. The point is, he loved it. And he was heartbroken that so many of his fellow Christians considered it a heathen beverage.
What was a pope to do? The early origins of coffee were very clearly tied not just to Muslim people, but to Islamic clergy. A lesser pope would’ve thrown up his hands, banned coffee, and kept right on imbibing in private. But Clement was cunning; his skill with popery knew no bounds. According to legend, he took his first sip and declared that “coffee should be baptized to make it a true Christian drink.”
It’s possible he’d secretly developed a taste for coffee before that moment. There are suspicions that the drink first made its inroads into Europe in 1529, when the Ottoman Empire laid siege to Vienna. According to legend, coffee pots were found among the abandoned Ottoman camps when the army retreated, and the Austrian defenders immediately realized a good thing when they boiled and drank it.
The history books are clear on one thing: Clement VIII loved him some coffee, and he rebelled against the notion that it might be a Muslim drink by straight-up baptizing it into the Christian faith, thus rendering coffee available to Christians on earth and—if I’m remembering the basics of my confirmation class correctly—in heaven.
Coffee at War
The militaries of history have a long, loving relationship with coffee. “Hot drink that keeps you awake” is a direct answer to the prayers of thousands of luckless soldiers standing guard on freezing cold nights across the precoffee battlefields of history. One of the first military units to adopt coffee, in the early sixteenth century, was the elite bodyguard of the Ottoman sultan. While the drug fell in and out of favor (often violently) over the next few decades, it spread quickly through the armies of history.
By the mid-nineteenth century it had made its way to America. William McKinley, the twenty-fifth president, earned renown in the Civil War for braving a hail of gunfire to bring his Union comrades hot coffee. The stresses of war cultivated a deep appreciation for/addiction to coffee among American soldiers. And it’s one they’ve never given up—every Meal, Ready to Eat (MRE) issued in the US armed forces today contains a packet of instant coffee.
But coffee’s first use in the annals of human conflict came long before the Ottoman Empire, or even before the idea that coffee beans and hot water belonged together. It started in Oromia, the tiny corner of our planet where coffee’s epic journey of global domination first began. The Oromo people are humanity’s first caffeine addicts. Their hunters and warriors fell in love with the bean and cherry, not as a drink but as a staple food for long journeys and dangerous situations.
Ancient Oromo warriors on their way to a raid would have ground their cherries and beans together with ghee into a mash, and then rolled that mash into a ball. This coffee-butter ball would then be carried in a small leather bag and eaten on the go. We’ve left coffee cherries behind in the modern world, but they’re an impressive food: rich in protein, sugar, and flavor. Add in the fat of all that butter and you’ve got a Neolithic power bar. Ball.
So how would this earliest coffee-based edible actually taste? I had to know.
HOW TO: Make Power Balls
Ingredients
½ cup coffee cherries and husks
½ cup dried coffee beans, preferably roasted
½ cup ghee (clarified butter)
Mortar and pestle
Small leather bag
Directions
Pour your cherries and husks in the mortar with the coffee beans. Using roasted beans is cheating slightly—you can just use dried coffee beans if you want extra authenticity, but the roasted variety tastes much better. Whatever you go with, grind the whole mess together with the pestle until the beans are as close to ground as you can get them, and thoroughly mixed with the cherries and husks. Finding ripe cherries is nearly impossible if you don’t actually grow your own coffee, but the dried variety works quite well, too.
Mix in your ghee in chunks, mashing it all up as thoroughly as possible. The resultant ball should be large enough to fit comfortably in your palm. When I made mine I wasn’t the least bit appetized. By looks, it should’ve tasted like a heart attack.
But I knew it wouldn’t be enough to just eat the concoction. I’d need to test it. Since this was a food made for a people who traveled, by foot, huge distances, I decided moving a long distance on foot was the only proper test.
I decided to run a half marathon on an empty stomach, with the leather bag containing my coffee ball swinging around my neck. Once my strength started to flag and fail, I’d eat the Power Ball and see if it could
give me enough energy to finish the run.
Again, I fully expected this thing to be disgusting, and anticipated vomiting as soon as I bit into that sphere o’ butter. But this weird little Ethiopian trick for staying awake to execute deadly raids worked. The leather bag—which was specified in my sources but not, I imagined, critical—wound up being the key to “cooking” this thing properly. On a hunch, I wore the bag around my neck. The heat from my body over the first five-ish miles of my run caused the ghee to melt, and the coffee cherries, husks, and grounds to swell.
The resultant mash was like an oily bag of trail mix, but it tasted fucking incredible. It was rich and chocolatey, with the delectable chewiness of the cherries and the oat-like shells and beans providing an enticing texture and mouthfeel. Each mouthful stuck to my ribs, and after two or three big pinches my hunger pangs were quelled and I felt a second wind grip me.
This stuff doesn’t just work: I actively prefer it to Clif Bars, PowerBars, and most of the granola trail mixes I’ve used over the last few years. Try it yourself, please. The world needs to know about this. The only downside I found is that carrying a big lumpy sack over my chest made it look a little like an Alien chestburster was perpetually about to break free from my sternum’s imprisoning walls.
I’m not a huge fan of quishir, or the ur-coffee I brewed up, but both bun and the Ethiopian butterball are delicious. When it comes to drugs, the old ways are often better. It’s not all urine-and-tobacco shots. And I suspect the sheer variety of historic coffee-based innovation has a lot to do with caffeine’s status as a universally appreciated drug.
