Coffee was probably first discovered in Ethiopia; the legend is that a goat herder called Kaldi saw that his animals were jumping around and being far more energetic than usual after eating some berries from a near by bush, he decided to eat some of the fruit himself and found that they opened his tired eyes and gave him renewed vigour.
             News of this spread through the area and eventually came to the attention of monks who dried the beans for transportation to distant monasteries. They then reconstituted them with water, ate the fruit and drank the liquid probably to help relieve fatigue during prayers. Coffee was then transported from Ethiopia to what is now called Yemen and from there to Turkey; where they were first roasted over an open fire, crushed and boiled to make a crude but very {I tried this for the essay} effective version of what we drink today.
             It was Venetian trade merchants who brought coffee to Europe in any quantity the first shipment being to Venice in 1615.The first coffee house in record was surprisingly enough opened in Oxford in 1650. This new beverage came under harsh criticism from the Catholic Church with some priests seeking to ban coffee calling it a drink of the Devil and part of the infidel threat from the Ottoman Empire, but to their astonishment Pope Clement VIII who was already a coffee drinker blessed it and declared coffee to be a truly Christian beverage.
             The Ambassador for the Turkish Ottoman Empire to the court of Louis XIV brought coffee into fashion with Parisian High society. As is custom in Turkey he offered it to everyone who visited, he even convinced the Sun King to give the drink a try. The King however decided that he preferred hot chocolate.
             Coffee houses spread around Europe quickly and became places of intellectual exchange and thought they were also influential, frequented mostly by artists and philosophers, also a forum of political activity and d
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