Origin

Without a doubt, the most delicious and popular beverage in the world is coffee, it's also one of the most ancient drinks. Its name is derived from the Turkish word, kawah, which means “that which wonders and makes thoughts fly”. Coffee plants come from ancient Ethiopia.

Coffee was discovered as a consumption product a very long time ago. Apparently it was being used in the VII century as food, afterwards as a fermented beverage, later as medicine, and finally as an infusion. In the Arabic history, there are many sides to the story about coffee’s discovery and its stimulating effects.

About its actual origin, there are different and interesting versions. No one knows for certain about the original discovery of the use of coffee. Amongst the existing legends, and the far most accepted one of all, tells the story of a shepherd who took his sheep out to pasture. One day, he found them eating some kind of red wild beans; to his surprise, the sheep started jumping up and down and getting all excited. As the shepherd saw this strange behavior, his curiosity led him to study how the animals’ behavior changed after they ate the shrub’s leaves and fruit. Legend says that the shepherd himself ate some and after a short while, he too was suddenly feeling happy and with the desire to sing and dance.

  The shepherd then took some branches and fruits to a convent’s abbot near his pasture sites. He told the priest about what had happened with his sheep and what he himself had experimented. The priest then took the branches and cooked the branches and the fruit, but afterwards the taste was so unpleasant that they threw them into the flames. When the fruit started to roast, it made an unbelievable nice smell, so the priest took the berries of the shrub and dried them out in the sun, roasted them, and finally made that beverage which we now call dark coffee, or just coffee.

This shepherd might have been the first person to ever see and experiment the stimulating powers of coffee.

 The propagation of coffee in the world

The Arabs where the first to discover the virtues and economical possibilities of coffee. This is because they developed the whole cultivating process of coffee and kept it as a secret. They also tried to prevent the extradition of any type of coffee seeds from their lands.

The role the Muslims had in the propagation of coffee, specially the Arabs, was very important. In the XIV century the Arabs took the plant to Yemen, where the first coffee plantations were made taking advantage of the potential economy growth it could bring. They kept to themselves their harvesting techniques, being very careful not to spread their knowledge about them.

All of a sudden, coffee started conquering territories around the world, becoming Europe’s favorite beverage. It spread to Italy en 1645, then to the Netherlands, England, and Germany. It spread throughout all Europe, and that is how coffee establishments were born. Later, in 1689, in Boston, United States, the first coffee shop came to life.

The request for coffee then started to flourish outside of its origin site, as well. In the XVII century, the Dutch started cultivating coffee in their colonies at Indonesia, and the French were the first to create plantations in Latin America.

To this day, coffee has become the second most sold product in the world; the first one: oil!

How coffee came to Honduras

There are no certain documents that state the exact date or the names of the people who brought the first coffee plants to Honduras. “An important source tells us that the first coffee beans came to Honduras through Costa Rica by Palestinian pedlars, harvested in Manto, a small town in Olancho, which once was a principal city”, said Ing. Pompilio Ortega, Agriculture Principal, and lover of coffee harvest.

In the province of El Paraíso, one of the main producers of coffee, it’s been said that in the first coffee estates, the beans were brought from Costa Rica. This version appears to be somehow accurate, because the shrubs maintain the same morphological features as the coffee that has been cultivated in that country.