Coffee’s Ancient Origins Part 1 of 3

For me, the morning starts with coffee.  Not any coffee, MY coffee.  Since a friend convinced me that I could roast my own, I have a hard time drinking anything else.  Coffee is mandatory fuel to start my day.  Productivity is difficult and sometimes nonexistent without it.  Yes, I am an addict, but not strictly to caffeine.  The heat, the rich nutty, chocolatey, and dried fruit flavors set the mood for that subtle caffeine kick.  As I get older, I have limited myself to 2 cups per day, and never after noon, so I make them count.

These next three posts focus on ancient origins of coffee.  Here is part 1.

The Original Power Bar:  Buna Qalaa, The Warrior’s Fuel

In the traditional culture of the Oromo people of Ethiopia, coffee was part of a compounded energy source known as buna qalaa. This was not a drink like we enjoy today, but a dense super-food created to support warriors, farmers, and merchants as they operated in the grueling environment of the Horn of Africa.

This super-food was painstakingly prepared:

• Ripe coffee berries were gathered and ground using stone mortars.
• The resulting mash of pulp and seeds was mixed with pure, spiced butter.
• This mixture was hand-rolled into balls.

These "power bars" provided an energy source and life-sustaining concentration of caffeine, protein, and fats. The 18th-century explorer James Bruce, who documented this culture in his 1790 work, Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile, wrote that buna qalaa were superior to a loaf of bread or a meal of meat because they "cheered their spirits as well as fed them".

Sprouted from the Tears of God

To the Oromo, coffee was never just a crop; it was a sacred element of their cosmology, known as Waaqeffannaa.

The legends speak of a man who refused to follow the will of the supreme God, Waaqa. Though the man's disobedience originally made Waaqa angry, the man's eventual death brought grief to the deity. Traditional stories tell that when Waaqa visited the gravesite the following day, his tears fell upon the earth—and where those tears fell is where the first coffee plants sprouted.

Because of this divine origin, the coffee plant’s "ever-green" nature symbolizes fertility and divine blessing. For the Oromo, planting coffee is considered a sacred act—a way of "clothing the earth" to maintain safuu (moral norms) and honor the divine in the agrarian landscape.

More than Food

This ancient history reminds us that our food systems are almost never merely economic. Most have been born from spiritual tradition and have a history of shaping our world as it is today. When you drink that next cup of coffee, think about what it took to get it to you.  It’s more than fuel and shouldn’t be taken for granted.

Stay tuned for the next post in our series, where we trade legend for the laboratory to uncover the 600,000-year-old genetic miracle that made coffee possible.

-Bob-