All About Coffee

About this book

William Ukers spent years gathering material for this huge history of coffee. He begins with the legends of its discovery, the Ethiopian goatherd Kaldi and his dancing goats, and with its first certain use among the Sufis of Yemen, who drank qahwa to stay awake during their night prayers. He follows coffee from Yemen and the port of Mocha to Mecca, Cairo and Istanbul, where the first coffee houses opened and were sometimes banned, and then to Venice, London, Paris and the Americas. Later chapters cover cultivation, trade, chemistry, roasting, brewing and coffee in art and literature.

Context and significance

Ukers (1873–1945), the editor of an American trade journal for tea and coffee, published the book in 1922, and it is still a standard reference, full of old illustrations. It shows how a drink from the Arab world changed social life everywhere. The coffee shops of nineteenth-century Cairo are described in Lane's Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians.

About the author