Ancient Coffee tradition | Coffee ritual in Ethiopia

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Today, with coffee in hand, everyone can choose the taste of coffee they prefer, but coffee culture has a long history. For people in the past, drinking coffee is not easy at all, and it can even be said to be a fine ancient art. Drinking coffee is an even more important ritual in Ethiopia, where coffee originated. With the arrival of the fourth wave of coffee, people began to understand the story of the upstream of coffee fruit crops. In that case, let's start in Ethiopia and explore the coffee culture of the origin of these coffees.

The birthplace of coffee

Ethiopia is located in East Africa, and more than 5, 000 wild coffee bean varieties have been found in the forests of the Kaffa region in the south of Ethiopia. Ethiopia is believed to be the birthplace of coffee-local residents became excited, powerful and even crazy when they found that cattle and sheep ate a plant with a red fruit. The locals picked the fruit to try, and slowly found themselves refreshed; so they began to pick them and plant them deliberately, because they came from Kaffa, so the world gradually named it Coffee.

Ethiopia is currently the largest coffee producer in Africa, but only 60% of the beans are exported and the rest are used in various forms of ceremony. for example, at weddings, coffee beans are mixed with coffee syrup, coffee and honey, and various herbs to ward off bad luck. Thus it can be seen that coffee is an inseparable part of local life.

Coffee is a belief.

For Ethiopians, coffee is both a belief and a culture. However, among the numerous ceremonies, the most important thing is the coffee drinking ceremony-the whole process of stir-frying coffee beans, cooking coffee powder, brewing coffee and drinking coffee, which is called the "coffee ceremony" (Coffee Ceremony).

This ceremony is a bit like the Japanese tea ceremony, in which there is a kind of spiritual consciousness. The purpose of the ceremony is to come to the conclusion that it can be used for a marriage proposal or to mediate family conflicts. The whole coffee ceremony was very long, about 1.5 hours on average. The ceremony begins with roasted coffee beans, and then the well-dressed women put the roasted coffee beans into the pot, so that everyone can smell the coffee beans, and then slowly make coffee.

The first cup of coffee is called Abol, which is the most important and worst cup to drink. If one of the parties must bravely drink the cup and state his point of view when resolving the conflict, the second cup is called Tona, which is boiled again with water, and the taste is still strong. If one party accepts his or her own point of view, he will drink it up, and if the other party does not drink it, there will be no third cup; the third cup is called Baraka, when the matter is settled and the conclusion is satisfactory, it symbolizes joy, and often the younger generation will be invited to drink this drink.

Whether it is the rich or the poor, they will also have a coffee ceremony. It has been joked that coffee is the reason why more than 80 tribes in Ethiopia can live together harmoniously. Although this is a joke, it is reasonable in terms of the extent to which they attach importance to coffee.