From Kafa to coffee

Book review of 'Where the Wild Coffee Grows'

Where the Wild Coffee Grows

The Untold Story of Coffee from the Cloud Forests of Ethiopia to Your Cup

Jeff Koehler

Bloomsbury

268 pages; Rs 699

Unlike coffee, the finding and refinement of brewing into a beverage of which are often wrongly attributed to the Arabs or Sufi monks, at no point was there any doubt that tea had its origin in China, where the people first used the beverage as a medicinal herb and drink during the Western Han period (circa 2006 BC-AD 9). The Europeans became aware of the drink only in the 17th century. Ahead of that for centuries, the Chinese joined later by other Asian people manufactured the beverage and traded in it extensively. None of this information is disputed because every development has been recorded with great prescience by travellers, historians and researchers. 

In stark contrast, the early history of the discovery of wild Arabica coffee fruits in the cloud forests of Kafa, a few hundred miles from Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa, and the subsequent development of a popular coffee culture there remained virtually unknown outside Africa till westerners started visiting the birthplace of the stimulating beverage from the 1930s. Jeff Koehler whose book on Darjeeling tea won much global acclaim has once again shown a polymath’s curiosity, an intelligent traveller’s urge to talk to the locals and commitment to exhaustive research in his new work Where The Wild Coffee Grows. The result is an excellent narrative on coffee that goes well beyond shining a light on Kafa as the birthplace of the beverage into the fight on our hands to save it from the scourge of climate change. Why shouldn’t Ethiopia get its due when coffee cultivated here is “generally considered the finest in the world with explosive flavours and unmatched floral and fruity notes”? 

Tea and coffee, whose labour-intensive cultivation has travelled from their respective places of origin to different parts of the world through centuries and often at the behest of colonial powers are today among the world’s significantly traded commodities. The common factor of the two products of the soil is that they commend themselves famously to the palates of people in all continents. Since the time tea made it to Europe long after coffee, the two beverages have intermittently remained locked in competition to win the patronage of drinkers. Many more steps are involved in making coffee and, therefore, the involvement of more hands from the point of collection of fruit to its roasting than is the case with tea. 

Mr Koehler bemoans distortions in history that Ethiopia will still at the most receive “a sentence or two” in any treatise on coffee. Even more distressingly, Kafa, which “arguably gave everywhere... its name for the drink,... rarely gets any mention at all”. Incidentally, Kafa was annexed by Ethiopia at the end of the 19th century. Mr Koehler, however, admits that sparing mention in coffee’s history of Kafa people living in forests were the first to collect the fruits and then in course of time brew the drink is not least due to the region’s local language missing a script till the 1990s. 

Stories of chance discovery of the red cherries on coffee plants sometime in the second century by a goatherd named Kalli in the cloud-shrouded forests of Kafa and the progression to a caffeinated drink were passed from one generation to the next. <i>Where the Wild Coffee Grows<p> is part a racy travelogue packed with information lying scattered in books, journals and scientific papers. In his arduous but exciting journey through Kafa, Mr Koehler heard such tales from some forest dwellers who are all excellent raconteurs. This exercise lends much value to the book. V S Naipaul writing about regions like Kafa in Africa said: “Perhaps the absence of a script and written words blurs the past.” This may be true, but the stories and myths about the beverage that Mr Koehler heard over unending cups of coffee in villages and forests of Kafa have survived over the centuries. 

People who love their coffee but will not claim knowledge of the subject will find in Mr Koehler’s deft and elegant history of the beverage some delightful information. Robusta is seen as the poor cousin of Arabica and the best of that comes from Kafa. In the Arabica family, unarguably the most exotic and expensive variety is Geisha, which one will be lucky to find in the “most elite specialty coffee roasters” in the world’s best cities. No chance of finding Geisha at Starbucks or Peet’s outlets. The exotic coffee now has a popular association with Panama in South America. We learn from this book that Geisha’s journey to Panama started in 1930s from an eponymously named area in Kafa. Seeds of Geisha finally arrived in Panama in 1963 after travelling through some African countries and Costa Rica. Thanks to Mr Koehler, Ethiopia and Kafa find their rightful places in the coffee world.