Clayton Pine from Pine Tea & Coffee talks about his passions for everything Tea & Coffee.
Some extra tea and coffee trivia from Clayton below
Where was the first coffee grown in Australia?
Answer: Castle Hill, NSW
According to The Hills Historical Society records, Pierre Lalouette de Venicourt, AKA lieutenant Colonel De Clambe, grew coffee, cotton, grapes and vegetables in 1802 on 200 acres including his home The Hermitage, which still stands at 340 Old Northern Road, Castle Hill Road, currently the home of Hills Family Funerals.
From my own knowledge the only other documented early growth of coffee was at Kangaroo Point south of Brisbane in 1832, which later spread to northern NSW where coffee is now grown around the Byron Bay area.
And by the way the question to celebrity contestant Molly Meldrum on the Who wants to be a Millionaire? programme,
Where was coffee first cultivated?
Answer:- His answer, a natural assumption was Ethiopia, but the correct answer was Yemen. There doesn’t seem to be any argument over where coffee was first cultivated. But where it was first grown is not fully substantiated.
The first substantiated consumption of coffee was in the C 15th Yemen where it became known as Qahwa and used like wine in the Sufi Monasteries.
But there are some reports of coffee consumption in the Ottoman Empire as far back as the C 14th and both Ethiopia and Yemen were part of that empire.
The myths of Khalid or Kaldi the Goatherd around 850 AD, and various monks, have been popularised to propagate the notion that Ethiopia is the origin of coffee trees.
But nothing has ever been scientifically substantiated.
Both Ethiopia and Yemen make claims of indigenous Heirloom varieties and yet they are over 1000 kilometres apart on opposite sides of the red sea.
Maybe coffees tree originate from a much wider area than most want to acknowledge.
As the years progress, and Ethiopia grows as the major force in coffee in the region, the marketing machines are re-writing history to reflect a parochial origin for the much loved bean.
The biggest coffee chain in Ethiopia is Kaldi’s.
Current production in Ethiopia is about 435,000 tonnes versus Yemen 500 tonnes in 2017 due to war, but increasing to 2,500 tonnes in 2019 or 0.6 percent of the Ethiopian volume.
All I know for sure is that the coffees from Yemen are unique, as are the coffees from Ethiopia, but different.