AN INFORMATIVE TRAVELOGUE ABOUT COFFEE’S JOURNEY

Book: Where the wild coffee grows Author: Jeff Koehler

Coffee is considered to be the world’s most important beverage, with about 2.25 billion cups of coffee consumed daily across the world and it has many health benefits too, particularly protective effects against Type 2 Diabetes and Alzheimer’s disease. But many people don’t know about the exact origins of coffee and how it traversed the whole world and became everybody’s favourite. The author Jeff Koehler, who has authored the award-winning book “Darjeeling; The Colorful History and Precarious Fate of the World’s Greatest Tea”- detailing about Darjeeling tea and the threat to tea plantations due to the deleterious effects of climate change, comes with another book “Where the wild coffee grows” which offers important historical perspectives and germane information about coffee through investigative excursions into Ethiopia and other countries having coffee plantations.
Aptly subtitled “The untold story of coffee from the cloud forests of Ethiopia to your cup”, the book takes us to the Kafa highlands of South-eastern Ethiopia, the areas where the Arabica coffee plant originated and where coffee evolved as a part of the local ecosystem, or as Koehler writes, earned it’s place in the forest. The foreign explorers found the Kafa rainforests “nearly impenetrable” for centuries and this kept coffee a local secret. We also get to know about the highlands rainforests of Ethiopia and the local coffee ceremony. Later, traders took the plant to Arabian Peninsula and Europe, and the narrative details how this journey led to the culture of coffee drinking, which has been incorporated as a routine in our daily life.
In the second half of the book, we get to know about contemporary coffee cultivation and the areas where it is practiced. The narrative also focuses on the threat to coffee plants from incurable coffee leaf rust fungus; and how the origins of coffee are relevant in contemporary times for one can take cues from the wild coffee plants in Kafa (which according to Koehler possess 99.8 percent of the world’s genetic diversity of coffee), to tackle the leaf rust fungus that has hit the Latin American plantations, particularly in Brazil.
This book is an impressive and well-told tale of the origins and history of coffee, which also details succinctly about the future of coffee plantations in an era of climate change and global warming. Though aimed specifically at coffee aficionados, who will find this account thoroughly expansive and brilliantly illuminating; this book will also be of interest to the general reader and the occasional coffee drinker, for they will get a close-up view about coffee farming and about the processing of coffee beans, and the narrative is equally stimulating, if not less so, than the occasional latte or mocha that they relish.