Page 46 - #53 English

Cover Story

Story by Coffee t&i Thailand
COFFEE ROASTING

Hidden Crafts Behind Your Cup

History of Coffee Roasting
We don’t know much about the origin of coffee
roasting by how or who started it but there’s an Arab leg-
end about a physician and a priest named Sheik Omar who
was exiled from Mocha, Yemen in 1258 AD. He wandered
into the desert close to the mountain of Ousab and was
starving after many days without food. Omar found the
red berries of a coffee tree and ate them, he found its taste
to be bitter, so he threw the berries in the fire hoping to
improve the flavors but the beans became hard. Omar then
tried to boil them to soften the bean but the result was he
instead got a black liquid out of it. After drinking coffee,
what we called nowadays, he discovered that these berries
gave him magical powers to be revitalize and awake. Once
the story of the “miracle drug” reached Mocha, Omar was
invited to return home with the berries he had discovered Industrial coffee roasting, 1880s
and was made a saint. Photo Credit: Thurber, Francis. 1887. Coffee: From Plantation
to Cup.A Brief History of Coffee Production and Consumption.

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