Call me Mr. Natural

If coffee drinking were a religion, Ethiopia would be the Holy Land. The coffee faithful would trek there, like the annual hadj of Mohammedans to Mecca.

In the Sidamo province of southern Ethiopia, where the Great Rift system lifts the north-eastern African plateau above 5,000 ft., the species coffea originated. It was from here that ancient traders, identities shrouded in the mists of time, ferried plants across the Red Sea to establish the first coffee farms on the arid mountainsides of southern Arabia, today’s Yemen. Read more