How I Learned to Stop Worrying
Correction: John Peter missed some things in the origin story of coffee. From All About Coffee:
The most popular legend ascribes the discovery of the drink to an Arabian herdsman in upper Egypt, or Abyssinia, who complained to the abbot of a neighboring monastery that the goats confided to his care became unusually frolicsome after eating the berries of certain shrubs found near their feeding grounds. The abbot, having observed the fact, determined to try the virtues of the berries on himself. He, too, responded with a new exhilaration. Accordingly, he directed that some be boiled, and the decoction drunk by his monks, who thereafter found no difficulty in keeping awake during the religious services of the night.
Another variant is that the herdsman ate the berries first, and the monks decided that the berries were bad and threw them in the fire. However, the smell was so good (according to them) that they ended up putting it in water and drinking it. It’s also said that the story took place in Ethiopia.
The book we referenced is All About Coffee by William H. Ukers, which is a complete history of the black brew.
The cover of All About Coffee
The first printed reference to coffee in the book Rauwolf’s Travels, by Leonhard Rauwolf, city physician of Augsburg
Pope Clement VIII, the pope who, according to this legend, first drank coffee