Coffee Cultivation and Roasting

The cultivation of the coffee plant and the roasting and brewing of its beans into a stimulant drink, a tradition credited by a popular but almost certainly legendary story to an Ethiopian goatherd named Kaldi, said to have noticed his goats' excitement after eating coffee berries. The earliest credible evidence of coffee drinking comes from 15th-century Yemen, where Sufi monks brewed it to stay awake through nighttime devotions, after which its cultivation and use spread through Mecca, Cairo and Constantinople and into the coffeehouse culture of the Ottoman world. Turkish coffee culture and tradition was added to UNESCO's Intangible Cultural Heritage list in 2013, honoring the specific preparation, unfiltered and slowly brewed to a foam, that spread from that history.