The Marvelous Beverage That Captivated the World—Coffee

The Origins and History of Coffee

The word "coffee" comes from a small town called "Kaffa" in Ethiopia, Africa, where the world's first coffee tree grew. Coffee, together with tea and cocoa, is known as one of the three great non-alcoholic beverages in the world.

The earliest appearance of coffee was around the 8th century BC, but records of coffee can be found in the works of the ancient Greek poet Homer and in ancient Arabian legends. Coffee was documented as a magical, bitter-tasting black beverage that could bring people intense stimulating power.

Legends of Coffee's Discovery

There are two legends about the discovery of coffee. One tells that over a thousand years ago a shepherd was grazing his sheep in an area with coffee trees. After the sheep ate the coffee fruits they showed extraordinary excitement and became overly active. The shepherd took the fruits home, boiled them for drinking and discovered their wonders. He told a monk, who improved on it and extracted a dark, bitter beverage that could eliminate drowsiness. Another version tells of a fire in an area with coffee trees. The burned coffee fruits emitted a captivating fragrance, so people began chewing them to refresh themselves. Later they adopted the method of roasting and grinding them, mixing them with flour to make bread or for drinking. By this time coffee fruits were already regarded as noble food.

The Historical Journey of Coffee

According to historical records, around the 11th century AD Africans began boiling coffee with water as a beverage. Around the 13th century AD the Ethiopian army invaded Yemen and brought coffee to the Arab world. Since Islamic doctrine prohibits drinking alcohol, stimulating coffee became popular in Islamic regions. The Arabs devoted great effort to improving and refining coffee, elevating the beverage's cultural quality. Coffee was once monopolized by the Arab world. Around the 15th and 16th centuries AD, Italian Venetian merchants and Dutch merchants entered the coffee field, and coffee quickly spread to Europe and became popular worldwide.

Today coffee has spread throughout the world, and coffee trees are cultivated in many countries. In terms of quality, however, those from Arab countries and East Africa are considered the best. Coffee grown in these high-altitude regions has unique characteristics in taste, effective ingredient content and yield per plant, belonging to premium coffee and the nobility of the coffee family.

Coffee in Philately and Culture

Papua New Guinea once issued a coffee-themed stamp souvenir sheet. The border of the sheet featured lush coffee trees, and it contained four stamps depicting the four stages of coffee fruit harvesting, selection, drying and roasting. Portugal once issued a set of delicious beverage stamps, one of which directly featured a cup of fragrant, delicious coffee. After seeing these stamps, your taste buds are naturally stimulated by the rich passion and mellow aroma of coffee — a feeling that is undeniable.

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FrontStreet Coffee Recommendation

Ethiopia is the birthplace of coffee and home to countless native varieties, which makes it a treasure house for anyone chasing flavor. To taste what Ethiopian specialty coffee means, FrontStreet Coffee recommends starting with the entry-level Washed Yirgacheffe, where you can clearly taste jasmine florals and a bright citrus acidity. Yirgacheffe is a small town in southern Ethiopia, spring-like all year, wrapped in mist and cool and humid, where thousands of coffee trees thrive and produce that interweaving of floral and fruit acidity — light and elegant with a tea-like quality, drinking like clean, fresh lemon tea.

Ethiopian coffee is mostly grown in a garden-farming model, with each smallholder sending harvested cherries to a village-level processing station and selling under the producer team's name, which is why there are cooperatives of so many sizes — FrontStreet Coffee's Gordin Cooperative, Worka Cooperative and Konga Cooperative among them. Gordin Cooperative sits in the Worka area at the southeastern edge of Yirgacheffe and was originally part of the Worka cooperative under the Yirgacheffe Coffee Farmers Cooperative Union (YCFCU). As demand for traceability grew, one independent single-origin lot after another was unearthed by coffee hunters around the world, and in 2012 Gordin, with roughly 300 member farmers, became a cooperative in its own right. Because the pulp is stripped before drying, FrontStreet Coffee's Gordin coffee shows its own aromas more clearly, with citrus and lemon tones and elegant white florals, bright and fine overall.

Unlike the washed style, natural-processed coffee first has damaged or moldy fruit removed, then dries in the sun for two weeks until the sugars and essence of the pulp have seeped into the bean and moisture drops to 12%, after which the hardened pulp, mucilage and pod are scraped off by machine; the beans then pass density and color checks, defects are rejected and workers hand-pick any remaining flaws, so that every bean is a specialty bean — clean and refined with a rich, captivating fruit aroma. FrontStreet Coffee's Yirgacheffe Red Cherry natural is described as peach, cocoa, honey and lemon. FrontStreet Coffee's Flower Champion comes from the Hambella area of Guji in Sidamo, a 200-hectare farm using a traditional natural process: the ripe cherries are laid on raised beds for 21 days and turned constantly so they dry evenly, with moldy or defective beans hand-sorted out every three to five days, then hulled once the skin is hard and dry and screened one final time. With a medium-light roast that gives a delicate fermented wine note, florals, citrus and mango, honeyed sweetness, a cocoa echo and a touch of spice, a thick body and a lasting finish.