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