Today's show is brought to you by COFFEE.  Actually every day's show is brought to you by coffee....because without it I would not be able to get out of the house in the morning!  The story of coffee is actually a really interesting history of international trade and relations between countries.

The Arabic word for coffee is qahwah, this word went into Turkish as kahve (Turkish does not have a W sound,) and from that we get the words cafe and coffee.  Qahwah is actually an old Arabic word which was another name for wine, but eventually after coffee was introduced it came to mean just coffee.
from this we also get words like caffeine and cafeteria....

The coffee plant is a small tree which actually originated in the mountains of Ethiopia.  The beans were used as both a food and to make the drink.  From Ethiopia, the Yemenis brought it over and planted it in Yemen, almost 600 years ago.  The Ethiopians called the tree, the coffee beans, and the drink made from them "Bunn," and that became the name of the beans in Arabic.  I think it's just a coincidence that "bunn" sounds like "bean."

From Yemen, coffee began to be exported all over the Arab world, and later to Turkey and Iran.  The main port from which coffee was exported was the city of al-Mukhaa...and that's where we get the word Mocha as a name for coffee.  So coffee growing started in Ethiopia, went over to Yemen, and for about 200 years Yemen was the most important coffee-growing center.  Then in the 1600's coffee started to become popular in Europe, and European merchants started to get in on the coffee trade. The Yemenis grew very rich from the demand for coffee in Europe, and prices were high.  So the Europeans figured they could break the Yemeni monopoly on coffee by growing the tree in other places.  They had lots of colonies, so the Dutch smuggled plants to Indonesia and started growing it there., and the British took the plants to Nigeria and Jamaica.  Even so, Yemen remained the center of the world coffee trade for hundreds of years.

There's a lot of talk today about "globalization."  The story of coffee is an amazing example of this.  From its origins in Ethiopia, coffee is now grown in about 50 countries around the world, and some 25 million people around the world depend on coffee to make their living.  Do you know what country produces the most coffee today?  It's not Yemen.  It's actually Brazil.   When you go to buy coffee, you usually find it called by the country it's grown in, such as Ethiopia, Colombia, Sumatra, Java, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Kenya, Jamaica, El Salvador, Costa Rica, and Mexico.  These are some of the best-known varieties of coffee.

An interesting subject in the history of coffee is its relationship with the religion of Islam.  You probably know that Islam prohibits drinking alcohol, or taking any other intoxicating substances.  So when coffee first started becoming popular, there was a big debate about whether it was legal or not, because of course it has an effect on the body.  This went back and forth over more than a hundred years, and sometimes coffee was made illegal, and then the next ruler would decide that it was legal after all.  Eventually coffee became accepted as Islamically permitted by almost everybody.  One of the earliest uses of coffee was actually as a medicine, although there was also a debate as to whether it was helpful or harmful.  And you know, that debate is still going on today.

Coffeehouses are very popular in the Arab world.  People (mostly men) go and sit and hang out with their friends and drink tea or coffee, play backgammon or dominoes.  Arabs today actually drink more tea than coffee.  In the past, storytellers would come and tell stories in the coffeehouses, but now most of the story tellers are gone and people just listen to the radio or watch TV.

The traditional Arab method of making coffee is to grind the roasted beans really fine, and boil them for a while in the coffeepot, called a dallah.  In much of the Arab world, the easier way is to take a spoonful of the ground bunn and mix it with water in a kanakah, and bring it to a boil over the stove.   It's drunk in small cups, called "finjaan."  Some people like it with sugar and some without, but you never add milk.  Either way you produce what the Arabs call Arabic coffee, and what people in the West usually call Turkish coffee.  Often it is mixed with the spice called cardamom.  (hayl or abb al-haan in Arabic)  Cardamom comes in little seed pods.  It is ground up and brewed with the coffee.  Cardamom was and still is an expensive spice, more expensive than coffee itself, so using cardamom was considered a luxury.  The wealthier you were, the more cardamom you used in your coffee, until if you were really wealthy, or as a sign of your hospitality, you served your guests coffee that was only about10% coffee and 90% cardamom--in fact it doesn't look like coffee at all--it's much yellower and more perfumy.  You can get cardamom at most grocery stores.  If you grind your own beans for coffee, you can add a few cardamom pods to give your coffee the "Arabic flavor."  If you use a coffee filter, you can just grind up the whole pod with your beans.  If you want to mix the cardamom directly with the beans in the water, in a kanakah, you will need to take the little seeds out of the pod husk first.