Black Gold. Antony Wild

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       ORIGINS

      All theory is grey. Green is the golden tree of life.

      GOETHE

      Although it is enjoyed daily by a good proportion of the world’s population, very little is generally known about the origins of coffee. There are a number of myths that are ritually aired by the coffee trade to keep the curious at bay, but nothing in the way of substantiated fact is usually presented to the public. To build a satisfactory picture of what happened in the time before coffee bursts upon the historical stage in the sixteenth century requires piecing together disparate elements of anthropology, archaeology, and even theology. Indeed, the search for coffee’s roots takes us back to the roots of man himself.

      In 1974, at Hadar in the Afar desert of northern Ethiopia, palaeontologists unearthed the fossil remains of a group of Australopithecus afarensis, mankind’s oldest known ancestor. Despite earlier discoveries of Java Man, Peking Man and others, it seems that Ethiopia is mankind’s original location; genetic research suggests that all modern humans are directly descended from a group of about a hundred and fifty Homo sapiens sapiens who lived in the Ethiopian Highlands some 120,000 years ago. Even the Holy Grail of anthropology, the so-called Missing Link, may well have been found there, for the recent discovery of a fossilized toe of Ardipithecus ramidus kadabba offers the first tentative evidence of the species’ separation from the chimpanzee some six million years ago. Despite its highland forest environment, Ardipethecus ramidus kadabba appears to have walked upright. Previously it had been conjectured that man’s need to stand upright was forced upon him by the evolutionary process to enable him to peer over the high grass of the plains in pursuit of prey. The fact that he appears to have stood upright whilst still confined to the forest has fatally undermined this theory.

      One of the other abiding mysteries of anthropology is the so-called brain explosion that probably took place about 500,000 years ago, the result of which was that man’s brain size increased by 30 per cent, principally in the cerebrum, the upper brain where most conscious thinking purportedly takes place. Various theories have been put forward for this, but the development of language would seem to provide the most credible explanation, as language requires a great deal of thought and in turn generates a great deal to think about. Its arrival put mankind in a position, at least in part, to determine the course of his own evolution, allowing him to develop and communicate concepts that had been hitherto literally unthinkable, and to begin to adapt his environment to his needs. It is tempting to wonder whether the proliferation of wild coffee trees in the same Ethiopian highland forests could also have had a hand in the process. Coffee has always been associated with speed of cognition and expression, and the sudden dawn of self-awareness in the Genesis story concerning the forbidden fruit of the ‘Tree of Knowledge’ is something that could have been prompted by a psychoactive substance such as caffeine. Such awareness (or, perhaps, gnosis) is also an attribute of language and thought, without which it is quiescent. To place the bright red coffee cherry centre stage in the story of the Fall is altogether a more inspired piece of casting than the choice of a lowly Golden Delicious; imagine coffee berries driving their eaters into a caffeine-fuelled frenzy of quick-fire contention and ingenious thinking, engines of brain evolution. The previously docile brains of Homo sapiens sapiens would have been ill prepared for such an assault. Likewise the Ethiopian Highlands, with their sumptuous vegetation and spectacular scenery, are a properly marvellous setting for the mythical Garden of Eden. Even today the wild coffee trees grow under the forest canopy on the escarpments of the Rift Valley, their white flowers heavy with a scent close to that of jasmine. The coffee cherries, the stones of which make two coffee beans, ripen in clusters as they grow from green through gold to a rich red colour, which stands out in bold contrast to the smooth, luscious dark green leaves of the tree. They were doubtless suitably tempting to our early ancestors. The description of the Tree of Knowledge contained in the rediscovered Old Testament Book of Enoch could easily suggest the coffee tree, with its depiction of delicious fragrance and clusters of fruit – and that previously missing book, supposedly suppressed because of its salacious content, was unearthed by the eighteenth-century explorer James Bruce in, strange to say, Ethiopia.

      At this point it would seem appropriate to introduce this native of Ethiopia, the species Coffea arabica of the sub-genus Eucoffea of the genus Coffea of the family Rubiaceae of the order Rubiales of the sub-class Sympetalae of the class Dicotyledonae of the sub-kingdom Angiospermae from the kingdom of Vegetables. Left to its own devices the Arabica coffee plant can grow up to twenty feet high; its lush, dark-green, ovoid leaves are about six inches long, and it produces small white flowers with the characteristic heady jasmine-like fragrance. The coffee tree usually flowers once in a season, but in some countries where it has been transplanted from its homeland, such as Colombia, it may blossom and produce cherries at various stages of ripeness throughout the year. The flowers are pollinated by insects and the wind, and go on to form ‘drupes’, which are infant coffee berries, and which grow over a period of six months to form bunches of cherries that in many respects resemble the bright red domestic eating cherry.

      As perhaps was the case with our putative Adam and Eve, ripe coffee cherries are a tempting proposition to some animals and birds, giving rise to some esoteric practices. Kopi luak is a fine Sumatran coffee, much valued in Japan, made from beans gathered from the dung of Paradoxurus hermaphroditus, the common palm civet, which skulks around the plantations at night selecting only the finest, ripest cherries. The beast digests the skin and the pulp of the cherry, the mucillage and the parchment surrounding the bean, and even the final obstacle, the thin ‘silverskin’. In so doing it achieves exactly what modern ‘wet’ and ‘dry’ processing technology seeks to emulate – that is, the complete separation of the core coffee bean from all its protective layers. The civet cannot digest the hard beans, however, and they pass through its system: they are picked out of the civet’s dung because the flavour imparted by the digestive process is highly prized once the beans are cleaned and roasted. Indian monkeys, parrots, and mongooses are also supposed to subscribe to this recondite method of coffee processing, and their coffee byproducts likewise are said to attract local enthusiasts. Not all such coffees pass entirely through an animal’s system: the spread of coffee cultivation in the Spanish Philippine Islands in the nineteenth century was evidently greatly assisted by Pardasciurus musanga, a small mammal which ate the flesh of the cherries but spat out the bean, which was then ready for germination.

      Insects, however, find their enjoyment of the coffee cherry considerably lessened by its caffeine content. While the leaves and flowers of a coffee plant contain slightly less than 1 per cent caffeine by dry weight, the pulp of the cherry contains a little more, and the bean itself around 3 per cent. Nature has so ordered things that the highest levels of caffeine are to be found in the most important part of the plant, its seed. This is because caffeine is nothing more than a natural insecticide, and the high caffeine levels protect the seed from unwanted attention. Hapless insects who ingest too much find that their nervous systems go into overdrive. By the miracle of international trade, the same symptoms can be observed in office workers the world over.

      The other species of coffee grown commercially around the world is C. canephora, the best-known variety of which is Robusta. The plant was first spotted by explorers in Uganda in 1862, where it was then used by the native Buganda tribe in a blood-brother ceremony. However, it was not until its rediscovery in the Belgian Congo in 1898 that it was thought worth cultivating. This was after outbreaks of hemileia vastatrix or ‘coffee rust’ had devastated the Arabica coffee plantations of Ceylon and the Dutch East Indies. Robusta coffee is, as the name implies, more robust than its Arabica cousin. It grows at lower altitude (and contains as much as double the amount of caffeine, perhaps in order to deal with the more persistent insects of the tropical lowlands), it tastes coarse and rubbery, and has very little to recommend it other than resistance to disease, which is in itself a recommendation only to planters. It was initially banned from the New York Coffee Exchange as a ‘practically worthless bean’. Being СКАЧАТЬ