Smoking Coffee Beans in Pipe

[markk]

How is it that we (Mankind) have come to know to roast coffee beans, grind them up, and use boiling water to extract their essence and drink the liquid, but we know to dry tobacco leaves, burn them rolled up in paper, and inhale the smoke? Why aren't we putting the coffee beans in a pipe and smoking them, and brewing tobacco leaves in a percolator? It can't be random.

For that matter, how did we discover in the first place that coffee contains a stimulating substance (that works best when you drink the brewed liquid of the roasted bean), and tobacco contains a calming one (that works best when you inhale the smoke)?

I have wondered this all my life. One friend once told me "trial and error", but that doesn't come close to answering it. That would imply that our ancestors took everything that grows, and experimentally ate it whole, ground it and brewed it, smoked it, etc. and kept mental notes on what effect each item had and which method worked best for delivering its substance. At some point did we roast/grind/brew/drink and dry/smoke/inhale everything on the planet? Does this mean that we applied those methods to cashew nuts, celery, grass, peaches, and said "nah, nothing from brewing or smoking them, let's keep going to see what other things will give us mind-altering properties", and eventually just settled on just brewed coffee beans and inhaled burning tobacco as major players in our daily lives?

[ghostrider]

I've often wondered the same. Not to get too far off the food track, but there is good archaeological evidence that humans were smoking cannabis sativa at least 60,000 years ago. (One might ask whether the resulting munchies led to further experiments with foodstuffs & fires.) Seriously, though, we've been at this for a long time.

There's also the curious fact that we homo sapiens types are the last surviving species in our genus. We clearly had better survival skills than our fellow hominids. Some have speculated that we were simply nastier & more brutish & killed them off. Lately I've begun to wonder whether we (also?) had better instincts in our eating experiments back at the dawn of time.

[TheFoodTutor]

One friend once told me "trial and error", but that doesn't come close to answering it.  That would imply that our ancestors took everything that grows, and experimentally ate it whole, ground it and brewed it, smoked it, etc. and kept mental notes on what effect each item had and which method worked best for delivering its substance. 

I think that, perhaps, you lack an understanding of exactly how many hours there are in a day when one lives in a moderate climate with abundant food, and yet television has not been invented yet.

I generally take it as read that just about anything that can be done with natural ingredients and rudimentary tools has been done at some point by various tribal cultures in the Amazon, throughout South America and pretty much throughout the world. No elaborate scientific process was necessary to weed out the things that were not tasty or which didn't deliver the desired substance, since the methods that proved pleasurable were simply repeated, and those the didn't produce the desired result were not repeated (though they were probably tried by multiple cultures in different areas, and even many individuals in one area.)

It goes without saying that items that caused fatal poisoning upon ingestion were given special notice, which is one reason why language proved adaptive to our species.

[markk]

I think that, perhaps, you lack an understanding of exactly how many hours there are in a day when one lives in a moderate climate with abundant food, and yet television has not been invented yet.

I generally take it as read that just about anything that can be done with natural ingredients and rudimentary tools has been done at some point ... No elaborate scientific process was necessary to weed out the things that were not tasty or which didn't deliver the desired substance,

I understand that our ancestors had a lot of free time. But, and I mean this all friendly, you didn't answer what my mind is trying to grasp. How did they even know that things had a "desired substance", and which ones did, and then, once they did, how did they know to grind and brew certain things and drink them, and dry and ignite other things and inhale the smoke? Did they systematically grind and brew, and dry and smoke everything around them?

[Andrew Fenton]

Trial and error, practiced over a long enough period, will get you pretty far. markk, you asked about coffee: here's the legend about coffee's origins. It's no doubt bogus, but stretch the timeline out over a few decades or hundreds of years, and you've got a more reasonable description of how it came to be used.

How is it that we (Mankind) have come to know to roast coffee beans, grind them up, and use boiling water to extract their essence and drink the liquid, but we know to dry tobacco leaves, burn them rolled up in paper, and inhale the smoke? Why aren't we putting the coffee beans in a pipe and smoking them, and brewing tobacco leaves in a percolator? It can't be random.

This one is pretty easy. Of course, people do use coffee in lots of different ways: in addition to the many different sorts of brewed coffee, it's also used for food. (The same goes for marijuana...) I encourage you to try smoking coffee, but I don't think you'll like the results. Similarly, people don't eat or drink tobacco because you can poison yourself if you do.

Just look at all the creativity about food that comes up on eGullet. Multiply that creative pool by a few million people and then by a few thousand years, and, well, there you go.

[srhcb]

Trial and error, practiced over a long enough period, will get you pretty far.

-------------------

Just look at all the creativity about food that comes up on eGullet.  Multiply that creative pool by a few million people and then by a few thousand years, and, well, there you go.

←

I think that's a pretty good explanation, especially if you consider that once the process of deciding what to do with available foodstuffs gets started, the easier it becomes and the faster it goes. ie: Carrots, turnips, and potatos all grow under ground and have a similar texture, hence they might all be prepared in like manner?

To really appreciate how trial and error can produce good results if practiced over a long period of time, consider how modern medical science is discovering how lots of ancient remedies and practices actually have sound scientific basis, and are effective and useful for developing new treatments.

SB (currently using coffee as a braising liquid for a roast beef)

[ghostrider]

Actually I suppose the real ansewr lies in evolution, right? I mean, it's not as if homo sapiens were suddenly plunked down semi-lingual & all in the wild & had to figure everything out. Our ancestors ate what their ancestors ate, & so forth, back to before humankind was even conscious of what it was doing.

Then once you've got fire, you start roastng things & if it smells good, it probably tastes good iin one form or another.

The key, as implied above, would be passing the knowledge down the generations, particularly as it derived more from craft & less from instinct.

[Pan]

I think that, perhaps, you lack an understanding of exactly how many hours there are in a day when one lives in a moderate climate with abundant food, and yet television has not been invented yet.

I generally take it as read that just about anything that can be done with natural ingredients and rudimentary tools has been done at some point ... No elaborate scientific process was necessary to weed out the things that were not tasty or which didn't deliver the desired substance,

I understand that our ancestors had a lot of free time. But, and I mean this all friendly, you didn't answer what my mind is trying to grasp. How did they even know that things had a "desired substance", and which ones did, and then, once they did, how did they know to grind and brew certain things and drink them, and dry and ignite other things and inhale the smoke? Did they systematically grind and brew, and dry and smoke everything around them?

←

Well, considering that people were trying to smoke banana peel in the 1970? (Remember the line from "Mellow Yellow": "Electric banana is the very next craze"? Some people took that as a cue to try smoking banana peel, without it getting them high, I understand. )

One thing that hasn't yet been mentioned is observing other animals eating things. If they can eat things, those things may still be toxic or indigestible for humans, but then again, they might be good. So, for example, was it the tiger that first introduced human beings to the durian? Maybe.

[srhcb]

Well, considering that people were trying to smoke banana peel in the 1970? (Remember the line from "Mellow Yellow": "Electric banana is the very next craze"? Some people took that as a cue to try smoking banana peel, without it getting them high, I understand. )

←

Specifically, as Donovan pronounced it: "E-lec-TREE-cul ba-na-na"

SB (can personally attest to the fallacy of the notion )

[Restorer]

It's not too much of a stretch to see it this way:

Coffee is indigenous to parts of Ethiopia. In Ethiopia, the civet cat has been eating coffee cherries for ages (the source of kopi luwak). It's possible the natives saw this, and decided to try eating the fruit of the coffee cherries. I don't know how coffee fruit tastes, but imagine the natives chucking the unchewable pits into the dying embers of a fire, then later discovering this wonderful smell coming from the fire. A brave individual picks some of the seeds (that's what they are, not beans) out of the embers, and tastes them. The roasting has made them chewable, and they have a decent flavor.

I can imagine the late-night fire-tenders sitting around chewing coffee cherries to stay awake, and chucking the beans into the fire. Some, as they pop, fly out of the fire pit and can be picked up and eaten.

Now, as to how ancient people figured out to grind up the coffee and put it in hot water... well, coffee only spread out of Ethiopia around the 9th century.

[srhcb]

It's not too much of a stretch to see it this way:

Coffee is indigenous to parts of Ethiopia. In Ethiopia, the civet cat has been eating coffee cherries for ages (the source of kopi luwak). It's possible the natives saw this, and decided to try eating the fruit of the coffee cherries. I don't know how coffee fruit tastes, but imagine the natives chucking the unchewable pits into the dying embers of a fire, then later discovering this wonderful smell coming from the fire. A brave individual picks some of the seeds (that's what they are, not beans) out of the embers, and tastes them. The roasting has made them chewable, and they have a decent flavor.

I can imagine the late-night fire-tenders sitting around chewing coffee cherries to stay awake, and chucking the beans into the fire. Some, as they pop, fly out of the fire pit and can be picked up and eaten.

Now, as to how ancient people figured out to grind up the coffee and put it in hot water... well, coffee only spread out of Ethiopia around the 9th century.

←

This theory is quite similar to one advanced by English essayist Charles Lamb in his famous Dissertation on Roast Pig, a work well known to English Majors, and a rather fun read.

SB (loves the description, "Bo-bo, a great lubberly boy")

[Carrot Top]

From "The Cambridge World History of Food":

The first human consumption of coffee has been obscured by time. But legends abound, such as that of a ninth century A.D. Ethiopian goatherd who tasted the bitter berries that left his flock animated

[. . .]

Coffea arabicia first appeared natively in Ethiopia, yet the berries went largely ignored before Arabs in Yemen used them to brew a drink. Although some Africans drank coffee made from fresh berries, others roasted it with melted butter,and in a few regions it was chewed without any preparation whatsoever.

[. . .]

A sheik of the Sufi order who lived in the port town of Mocca in the late fourteenth or early fifteenth century may have been the first to devise a technique for roasting, grinding, and brewing coffee beans

(The mystical Shadhili Sufi had been using the beans during nighttime chanting rituals).

There is an incredible amount of interesting and important social history that goes along with the coffee bean as it is used as social, economic, and religious tool.

...................................................

My best hazarded guess would be that the beans were first boiled raw as one does when finding something new that has a hard surface. Who knew . . maybe they would make a nice soup.

More from Cambridge:

It is interesting to note that in Yemen, many preferred to chew the beans or brew a tea with the husk [. . .] rather than use the beans, and to this day Yemenis do not drink much coffee.

Probably at some point someone tried smoking coffee and discovered it just was not that great that way?

(I once worked in a place where coffee was traded from the green bean. It never smelled particularly attractive to me when roasting. It would not make me want to smoke it. )

(On the other hand, I once lived near a tobacco field and wanted to inhale, to dive, into the aroma of those leaves as they cooled from the hot sun in the evening. Luscious.)

[YummyInMyTummy]

You know whats even more mysterious? How did we figure out that mold (cheese) would taste good? Why would we even eat something like cheese in the first place, it stinks and its mold?

[lexy]

You know whats even more mysterious? How did we figure out that mold (cheese) would taste good? Why would we even eat something like cheese in the first place, it stinks and its mold?

←

Because you're hungry and there's not much else available, so you take your chances on the cheese. You live, and suddenly you've found a way to vastly extend the use of milk.

Edited February 22, 2007 by lexy (log)

[markk]

Hi, O.P. here. I can understand the cheese. You have too much milk (you drank it in the first place because you saw young animals drinking it and figured out it was good for them and therefore maybe good for you, especially if you and yours weren't getting enough sustenance) and it spoils or separates, and because there's not enough food around to prevent starvation, you eat the curdled milk and it's fine, so you pack it in something to get it out of the liquid and perhaps firm it up and try to keep it, and it's fine then as well, and even when it gets moldy, it's still fine, and tastes nice. That scenario makes sense to me.

But I can't follow the coffee bean evolution. You see certain animals eating them, they get agitated and energetic, so you eat them too (the beans) - that I can see. But they're horrible to eat, and not very filling, so you spit them out and presumably give up. It's not like you stubmled on the animals in a clearing, and they were roasting the beans, grinding them, percolating them and drinking it and you said, "Aha! So that's their secret!"

And similarly the tobacco, If we didn't try eating it, as we must have tried with every food we found, how'd we come to the cigarette process, and why?

This is to say I buy the idea that early man didn't have a lot of food choices, and tried eating everything around him, and even that he tried to eat the magical beans that perked up those animals who they saw eating them and then acting energetic, but the leap to the brewing process and the smoke-inhalation process still aren't clear to me, to my poor mind which is at fault here trying to grasp this, and certainly the fault of the posters trying to help me.

[srhcb]

This is to say I buy the idea that early man didn't have a lot of food choices, and tried eating everything around him, and even that he tried to eat the magical beans that perked up those animals  who they saw eating them and then acting energetic, but the leap to the brewing process and the smoke-inhalation process still aren't clear to me, to my poor mind which is at fault here trying to grasp this, and certainly the fault of the posters trying to help me.

←

The way the World changes so fast today it's hard for us to imagine thousands of years going by with very little discernible progress being made in eating, or any other aspect of life.

The way I look at it, the process of evaluating natural substances for their utilization didn't start from scratch in every instance, but itself evolved over many generations.

If a new berry, leaf, mushroom or even animal was encountered, people drew upon their knowledge of the appropriate methods applied to similar berries, leaves, mushrooms and animals.

As the basic store of knowledge expanded over the years, the process accelerated exponentially. Advancements in communication, first speech and then writing, further speed up the process by making information transportable.

Evolution of anything is a complicated procedure. (ask those poor species that still haven't developed opposable thumbs! ) It depends on, well, everything else. Sometimes finding the best use for a substance is instantaneous, sometimes it takes a while.

Turning grain into bread is one of the oldest universal food altering procedures, and it's common throughout the World. Still, I'd guess there were periods of tens or hundreds of thousands of years between the dates these methods evolved in different civilizations?

SB (Remember, chocolate was just a drink until about one hundred years ago! )

[Carrot Top]

And similarly the tobacco,  If we didn't try eating it, as we must have tried with every food we found, how'd we come to the cigarette process, and why?

This is to say I buy the idea that early man didn't have a lot of food choices, and tried eating everything around him, and even that he tried to eat the magical beans that perked up those animals  who they saw eating them and then acting energetic, but the leap to the brewing process and the smoke-inhalation process still aren't clear to me, to my poor mind which is at fault here trying to grasp this, and certainly the fault of the posters trying to help me.

←

I put most of invention down to accidents. Something happened by accident, like a tobacco field was on fire, and someone happened to be there inhaling it and they liked it. (That is pure guessing, I haven't read about tobacco in any books whatsoever and it may be not only pure guessing but also pure nonsense, but anyway . . . you get the idea )

Other parts of invention I put down to play, to curiosity. If you have no books as they haven't been invented and no advanced studies programs in universities for they haven't been invented either, what do you do? You poke and prod and twist and turn and combine everything that happens to be around you in the natural world. Why not? What else is there to do except kill the monthly mastodon and take a bite or two now and then? Naturally there likely were always those standing around laughing and making fun of the ones who kept trying to do odd things with familiar things, and often enough probably nothing was "discovered" or invented at all. But we're curious about things, as a species, so how else do you learn? You just play, just to do it. And sooner or later one little thing is learned then another.

Play. It's what started every single thing humans invented, combined with its solemn sister neccesity, to my mind.

Edited February 22, 2007 by Carrot Top (log)

[slkinsey]

Steeping/boiling tobacco tends to kill the people who drink the water due to nicotine poisoning. Eating tobacco tends to produce a very upset stomach, and can also kill you in fairly small amounts. With either way, its pretty easy to take in enough nicotine to make you very sick.

[coastie]

Necessity----years of trial and error. I forage and get a fair amount of information about the plants from historical usage in the native peoples of the area I live. i can't speak for coffee and tabaco but I believe it was a lot of trying this and that and then transfering the plant knowlegde thru the " shaman" . Even today we apply principles about plant families to get a desired result. It doesn't always work...but necessity and time created these items. Generations, not an individual.

[cakewalk]

". . . but the leap to the brewing process and the smoke-inhalation process still aren't clear to me . . ."

←

No leaps. Crawls. Lots of dead stops in between crawls. Then some more crawling. Seems fast in hindsight.

I'm always amazed that for the longest time the whites who settled North America thought tomatoes were poisonous, until the Native Americans taught them otherwise. Somebody upthread mentioned that poisonous foods must have been learned very quickly and remembered very clearly. Very understandably.

[miladyinsanity]

". . . but the leap to the brewing process and the smoke-inhalation process still aren't clear to me . . ."

←

No leaps. Crawls. Lots of dead stops in between crawls. Then some more crawling. Seems fast in hindsight.

I'm always amazed that for the longest time the whites who settled North America thought tomatoes were poisonous, until the Native Americans taught them otherwise. Somebody upthread mentioned that poisonous foods must have been learned very quickly and remembered very clearly. Very understandably.

←

Maybe there's some sort of poisonous fruit or vegetable that resembles a tomato closely?

[chiantiglace]

I think we overlook the fact that for thousands of years things happened on accident, and then the observers spent much of their time recreating something or perfecting it.

I think it also has to do with custom. Basically the same sort of people that were boiling coffee beans were boiling all sorts of other nuts, vegetables and spices, ie. peppers and cacao.

Its just like the first people to ever properly coagulate an egg, all of the sudden everyone jumps on the banwagon to find a new way to do it, or what can be done with it.

The difference between the past and present, is we document everything we do. And many things happen as experiments and theories. But a lot of new things come about when we are trying to solve a completely different problem, hence artificial sweetners.

It is humorous to think about, but in the long run I think its just the way man is, discover something new and manipulate it to death until something new comes along.

[phaelon56]

One of the best and most detailed recountings of coffee's origins and the most likely explanation for how it came to be brewed (rather than smoked) is found in this excerpt from the coffee history page found on the Ethiopian culture site Selamta.net . Their section on Ethiopian Recipes is also quite informative.

The story of coffee  has its beginnings in Ethiopia, the original home of the coffee plant,  coffee arabica,  which still grows wild in the forest of the highlands.  While nobody is sure exactly how coffee was originally discovered as a beverage, it is believed that its cultivation and use began as early as the 9th century. Some authorities claim that it was cultivated in the Yemen earlier, around AD 575. The only thing that seems certain is that it originated in Ethiopia, from where it traveled to the Yemen about 600 years ago, and from Arabia it began its journey around the world.

Among the many legends that have developed concerning the origin of coffee, one of the most popular account is that of Kaldi, an Abyssinian goatherd, who lived around AD 850. One day he observed his goats behaving in abnormally exuberant manner, skipping, rearing on their hindlegs and bleating loudly. He noticed they were eating the bright red berries that grew on the green bushes nearby.

Kaldi tried a few himself, and soon felt a novel sense of elation. He filled his pockets with the berries and ran home to announce his discovery to his wife. ‘ They are heaven-sent, ’ she declared. ‘ You must take them to the Monks in the monastery. ’

 

   

Kaldi presented the chief Monk with a handful of berries and related his discovery of their miraculous effect. ‘ Devil’s work! ’ exclaimed the monk, and hurled the berries in the fire.

Within minutes the monastery filled with the heavenly aroma of roasting beans, and the other monks gathered to investigate. The beans were raked from the fire and crushed to extinguish the embers. The Monk ordered the grains to be placed in the ewer and covered with hot water to preserve their goodness. That night the monks sat up drinking the rich and fragrant brew, and from that day vowed they would drink it daily to keep them awake during their long, nocturnal devotions.

While the legends attempt to condense the discovery of coffee and its development as a beverage into one story, it is believed that the monks of Ethiopia, may have chewed on the berries as a stimulant for centuries before it was brewed as a hot drink.

Another account suggests that coffee was brought to Arabia from Ethiopia, by Sudanese slaves who chewed the berries en route to help them survive the journey. There is some evidence that coffee was ground and mixed with butter, and consumed like chocolate for sustenance, a method reportedly used by the Galla tribe of Ethiopia, which lends some credence to the story of the Sudanese slaves. The practice of mixing ground coffee beans with ghee (clarified butter) persists to this day in some parts of Kaffa and Sidamo, two of the principle coffee producing regions of Ethiopia,. And in Kaffa, from which its name derives, the drink is brewed today with the addition of melted ghee which gives it a distinctive, buttery flavour.

From the beginning, coffee’s invigorating powers have understandably linked it with religion, and each tradition claims its own story of origins. Islamic legend ascribes the discovery of coffee to devout Sheikh Omar, who found the coffee growing wild while living as a recluse in Mocha, one famous coffee producing place in Yemen.

He is said to have boiled some berries, and discovered the stimulating effect of the resulting brew, which he administered to the locals who were stricken with a mysterious ailment and thereby cured them.

There are numerous versions of this story concerning the Sheikh Omar, which relate how he cured the King of Mocha’s daughter with coffee, and another where wondrous bird leads him to a tree full of coffee berries.

Arabic scientific documents dating from around AD 900 refer to a beverage drunk in Ethiopia, Known as ‘buna’, and the similarities in the words suggests that this could be one of the earliest references to Ethiopian, coffee in its brewed form. It is recorded that in 1454 the Mufti of Aden visited Ethiopia, and saw his own countrymen drinking coffee there. He was reportedly impressed with the drink which cured him of some affliction, and his approval made it soon popular among the dervishes of the Yemen who used it in religious ceremonies, and introduced it to Mecca.

Not surprisingly... coffee beans from Yemen are among the very few that are considered to be "heirloom" varieties - still grown, harvested and processed by the most traditional methods and in terms of flavor profile - much wilder, earthier and less predictable (in a good way) than the more common Arabica varieties that have been refined over the centuries through agricultural and cross-breeding techniques.

From a more generalized "how in the heck did peopel figure out that you could eat it?" perspectov e I found much of interest in this relatively new book - which by chance I finished reading yesterday

Brutal Journey: The Epic Story of the First Crossing of North America

From the review:

Among the many irresistible details that Schneider includes in his book is the wide variety of items — from worms to spiders to ant eggs — that the conquistadors may have eventually been reduced to calling "food." So desperate were they that they killed and ate their horses, and then some of them, crossing the thin line between desperation and despair, began to eat their fallen comrades.

Much of what they were "reduced to calling food" was introduced to them by the indigenous peoples with whom they found shelter (or in some cases were enslaved by). The context was the often harsh and inhospitable Gulf Coast region from Florida to Texas and beyond. The groups who introduced them to these foods were more gatherers than hunters. The levels of famine and starvation that peridocially affected these cultures were such that, by necessity, they were sometimes forced to try eating anything that might conceivably ward off death by starvation.

I think this is a natural process - fraught with peril but somehow genetically encoded when thgins get bad enough. There was even mention of one group that sometimes ate deer dung. Why? The evdience indicates that certain animals that could not customarily digest grasses were able to do so temporarily if they ate the grass after consuming the deer dung. I imagine that some enzynmatic magic was at work but I find thsi endlessly intriguing.

[Knicke]

". . . but the leap to the brewing process and the smoke-inhalation process still aren't clear to me . . ."

←

No leaps. Crawls. Lots of dead stops in between crawls. Then some more crawling. Seems fast in hindsight.

I'm always amazed that for the longest time the whites who settled North America thought tomatoes were poisonous, until the Native Americans taught them otherwise. Somebody upthread mentioned that poisonous foods must have been learned very quickly and remembered very clearly. Very understandably.

←

Maybe there's some sort of poisonous fruit or vegetable that resembles a tomato closely?

←

There is - tomatoes, potatoes, chayote, and eggplant (I think) are in the Solanaceae family. Another family member is deadly nightshade (pretty darn poisonous). I imagine cherry-type tomatoes would look pretty similar to nightshade unless you knew better (if you look at the leaves/fruits, they are remarkably similar). Not an unfounded fear at all.