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To trace its origin, coffee was reportedly first discovered growing in Ethiopia by a sheepherder named Khaldi. Whenever he moved his sheep into one particular pasture, the sheep would start acting extremely lively and erratic after eating the “red cherries” on a particular bush found in that pasture. Tentatively, Khaldi tried eating a few of the beans himself and experienced the same reaction. The local area monks heard about Khaldi and this “devil’s fruit” but soon they too were eagerly sampling it so they could stay awake for their prayers. Arab traders, during a trading expedition, decided to bring back some beans to their homeland and began to plant and grow their own beans. Soon they began to boil the beans and produced a drink called “qahwa” (meaning being “unable to sleep”). The word “coffee” comes from the word “Kaffa” which is the region in Ethiopia where coffee originated. The drink gained in popularity until around 1453 when the Ottoman Turks introduced the beans to Constantinople and in 1475 the world’s first coffee shop; “Kiva Han” was opened in the city. The “coffee craze” developed to a point where women could even divorce their husbands if they failed to provide the women with a daily ration of coffee. The mere existence of the plants was a closely guarded secret in the Moslem countries when an Arab named Baba Budan started the actual spread of this delicacy to the outside world illegally. Baba Budan smuggled some beans to Mysore, India where descendants of these first smuggled plants can be found to this day.  In 1600, Italian traders brought some of the beans to Pope Clement VIII who was urged to ban the drink as “unholy” because it came from Moslems that were “Non Christians” but he surprised them by “baptizing” it instead. Now “coffee” was an acceptable beverage for Christians. A few years later, Dutch traders smuggled out a coffee plant from the port of Espresso to the island of Ceylon and to their East Indian colony of Java, source of coffee’s nickname today. In 1713, the Dutch unwittingly gave a coffee bush to Louis XIV of France that, from which, in 1723, a French naval officer, Gabriel Mathieu do Clieu, stole a seedling and took it to Martinique. Eventually, 90 percent of the world’s coffee spread from this one plant.                                                                                                                                         Ahtough coffee is often referred to as a plant, most people aren’t aware that coffee grows on trees.The very best coffee beans get their start on the shiny leaves of the evergreen coffea arabica tree. This shrub-like tree, originally a native to Africa and Asia, bears small white blossoms that look and smell like jasmine flowers. As many as 60 blossoms can bloom at one time. When the tree is three to five years old, it will bear fruits called cherries. Another fact most folks never get is that coffee is indeed a fruit, and like all other fruits, there are seeds inside. Most of these fruits have two coffee beans inside, but a small percentage will contain a single bean, also known as a peaberry. Peaberries are either discarded or sold separately. Some coffee drinkers believe that these small round beans have a particularly distinctive flavor, and you’ll hear more about these delicacies as you move throughout the site. We hope you find a wealth of knowledge as you read about Reggie’s Roast, and if there’s something you know that you’d like to share with us, visit the ‘Contact” tab and say hello!