The popular coffee narrative these days is so heavily tilted in favour of the final point in the chain, where the beverage is prepared for consumption, that little is written about the land where Arabica first grew. Jeff Koehler rectifies this lacuna in an expansive travelogue that begins in the Kafa highlands of southeastern Ethiopia with the local, heavily stylised coffee ceremony (“not only did the Arabica coffee plant originate here, but so did coffee drinking”), and ends with the pointer that all these centuries later, the world may have to rectify its failure to attribute the origins of coffee-drinking to Kafa by going back to the wild coffee plants there to solve various crises, such as leaf rust fungus that has hit the Latin American crop, around the world.
It is estimated, reports Koehler, that “Ethiopia possesses 99.8 per cent of the world’s genetic diversity of Arabica.” And given a coffee plantation industry across the continents with very little genomic variety, there will be nowhere else to go.
But going to Kafa is about more than finding solutions — it is about learning the moving history of Kafa, with this once rich kingdom finally absorbed into Ethiopia in the late 19th century, and appreciating a people possessed of an uncommon grace and affinity with their surroundings that can be felt in the nuances of the coffee ceremony. As Koehler quotes anthropologist Rita Pankhurst, “It is not surprising that in Ethiopia, where there is so much knowledge about the properties of the country’s extensive flora, the wild coffee plant should also, at some unknown period, have yielded its secret.” Folktale has it that centuries ago a shepherd noticed a unique smell on the breath of his goats. Following the goats, he traced the plant leaves they had been consuming, and took them home to be boiled. This leaf infusion is still popular in parts of Ethiopia, and is said to be high in antioxidants. In time, people noticed that birds ate the coffee bean — and they began to roast it to eat. As for the eventual progression to grinding the beans and preparing a cup of coffee, little is documented, but the coffee ceremony appears to hold the clues.
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Koehler’s book is, thus, also a nudge to look beyond the high-street fetishisation of single-shot brews and survey the diversity of coffee-preparation traditions.
Where the Wild Coffee Grows: The Untold Story of Coffee from the Cloud Forests of Ethiopia to Your Cup ; Jeff Koehler, Bloomsbury, ₹699.