Beer may be the oldest man-made brew, with wine a distant second. Beer recipes are at least as old as 6000 BC, but the oldest winemaking processes date ‘only’ from about the turn of the first millennium.

Their younger cousin, coffee, arose a few hundred years later, though no one knows how old the plant itself is. Some archaeological evidence shows that humans were eating the berries as long ago as a hundred thousand years.

One legend says that a goat herder in Ethiopia observed his charges eating the red berries from a nearby tree and became excited. Trying them himself, he too felt a great lift. By 600 AD that magical berry, and the brew made from drying and grinding its seeds, had found its way to what is now Yemen, on the southern tip of the Arabian peninsula.

Read more on the history of coffee.

Trackback URI | Comments RSS