Ethiopian Coffee Ceremony
The goats got frisky, the herdsmen were convinced, but the monks initially disapproved … papyrus reeds scattered on the floor and thick incense to keep the bugs away … “Red Bull and Jolt Cola have got nothin’ on this rocket fuel” … the third round of coffee toasts is Baraka, and that’s the one that has all the luck in it … the original genetic line, preserved in the ancient monasteries …
Legend has it that coffee was first discovered in Ethiopia when a herdsman from the Kaffa region noticed that when his goats ate the berries off a particular bush, they got really frisky and ecstatic, dancing around on their hind legs. He took the cherry (a quirk of coffee: the plural and singular for the raw berries are the same: “cherry”) to the local monks, who condemned it as sinful and tossed it into the fire. Well, in the fire, the cherry split open and people started “waking up and smelling the coffee” as it were. They raked the roasted beans out of the coals, crushed them up and put them in boiling water to distill out the essence – a process that in its basic steps, really hasn’t changed over the millennia.
The other students were making fun of this poor guy for doing “woman’s work.” The student kind of reddened at this, but kept on with his duty. In the lower left, you see the popcorn; in some of the videos, you can see the giant round of bread and the roasted barley.
Over the centuries, the ceremonial sharing of coffee has become a Really Big Deal; I was honored to be invited to a number of these ceremonies, which, in the smaller villages, are held three times a day, and all the important people in the village show up to trade gossip about who did what to whom, argue over politics and haggle over the price of everything from a new donkey, to a batch of prepaid scratch-off phone cards. As one of the objects of curiosity at these ceremonies, I learned to ignore all the people sneaking up behind me to have their friends surreptitiously snap cellphone photos of themselves posing to show how tall I am. (One of my students tried to teach me the Amharic phrase for “Albino giraffe”, (Quach’ne shasho) which was apparently one of my nicknames. Well, at least it wasn’t “Albino hippo” or something even worse.)
Anyway, the ceremony starts with the scattering of papyrus reeds on the floor and the burning of strong, sweet incense. A young girl dressed in a traditional white dress with colorful woven borders, sits on a stool, next to a clay brazier filled with heavy chunks of charcoal. She washed a handful of beans in the heated pan, and then shakes away the husks. When the beans have been roasted to shiny blackness, she grinds them up with a mortar and long-handled pestle. The grind is pretty uneven – it varies all the way from powdery espresso-type to coarse French Press consistency, all in the same batch. The maiden slowly stirs the ground-up coffee into a “jebena” which is a round-bottomed black pottery coffee pot, with a straw lid.
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