I’m a little coffee bean sitting in a jute bag in Kodagu, along with my family. I would like to tell you the story my grand father once told me of how my ancestors originated.

My ‘ancestors’ hail from the highlands of Ethiopia, where they were first found and consumed as food.

Quite surprisingly, they were also used as currency in Arabia in 500 A.D. Legend has it that goats at the monastery were awake and restless after eating a few of my ‘ancestors’. Hence, out of sheer curiosity, the shephard put a few of the beans, then unknown, into boiling water. The brew turned out wonderful, both in aroma and taste. We were thus introduced to man in this manner.

Coffee Berries

Yemen was our settlement 500 years ago. We resided around the city of Mocha there. Before 1500 A.D., my ancestors were known to Europeans as ‘Kaffa’. We were slowly introduced to the rest of the world by travelers. We were sent to Egypt in 1510, Constantinople in 1550, Venice in 1616 and England in 1650, where we had a special place. Coffee houses were also being set up for us around the world.

From Yemen, some of my relatives were sent to Kenya and Java. From Java, one variety was taken to a garden in Amsterdam, where my family grew. From there again, some were sent to Surinam in 1718 and Brazil in 1927, where they settled in Rio de Janeiro in1780. My relatives were constantly on the move. From Amsterdam, a few of them went to the Caribbean, Hawaii and the Philippines. We were soon well- known all over the world and were settling everywhere.

Coffee Berries on a Coffee Plant

A few of us were sent to Turkey from Yemen, where we were roasted, crushed and brewed. In 1700, my ‘uncles’ entered America and one of them traveled across the Atlantic, becoming the predecessor of over 19 million of us in half a century. By now, we were so famous that we were called the ‘National Drink’ in the United States. In the early 70’s, we were even introduced in Vietnam.

In 1600 A.D., a few of my ‘relatives’ migrated to India along with a pilgrim called Bababudan. He took seven of them with him to his hermitage in Karnataka. There our family grew and spread throughout the rest of the subcontinent. A few of them came to Nalaknad in Kodagu, and subsequently gave rise to the luxuriant Coorg plantations found there today.

Hence, here I am, sitting cozily in the corner of my jute ‘cottage’ in Chikkanahalli Estate, fondly ruminating about my past.

Bavna Aaachayya

Bavna Aaachayya is a B.Com student at Mount Carmel College, Bangalore. She is the daughter of a coffee planter from Coorg and greatly interested in plantations herself. She is passionate about writing and photography and calls the environment her main inspiration. She visits Coorg often, and is motivated to write about it and inform people about a planter’s life. She can be contacted at: bavnaachayya@gmail.com

This entry was posted on Monday, August 2nd, 2010 at 7:32 PM and is filed under Culture, Flora, Plantation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.