I’ve been reading Coffee: A Dark History for the last month or so. And while I’m only 48 pages in (it feels like I’m reading a history textbook and I really don’t like history textbooks), it does have a few positive points. I am, so far, receiving an enormous amount of detailed chronology from the very start of coffee’s recorded appearance in history. On the negative side, not only are the paragraphs riddled with unneccessary adjectives and flourished words, but it goes off into tangents. One of these tangents is the introduction of tea from China and its impacts on the brewing of coffee.

Since it appeared inconceivable that the first humans of Ethiopia (coffee’s birthplace) ate the rock-hard raw green beans inside the coffee cherry, leaves were used first as a drink. Directly from the book (page 41), author Anthony Wild lists several ways of brewing coffee as tea:

amertassa: natural, shade-dried leaves infused in water

kati: pan-fried leaves infused in water

kish’r: bean-less dried coffee cherries infused in water

It would be quite interesting to try these coffee-teas out. Today, amertassa can be found in Ethiopia and kish’r in Yemen. I’m making a mental note to drink them when I travel out there.