Ecologically, this seemingly innocuous plant has more than made its mark. The cultivation of the plant has changed the landscape in many different regions of Central and South America. Deforestation and other early cultivation practices have hurt the land edaphically as well as removing all the traces of the biodiversity that might naturally slowly renew the land. Culturally, coffee replaced beer as the most popular beverage of most of Europe starting in the fifteenth century, causing a slight sobering effect on the populace, but encouraging an unprecedented degree of social vigor. Conversely, in most of the Central and South American countries situated ideally to grow coffee trees, the manner that the system of agriculture developed was one of extreme stratification and disparity of situation.
Tradition has it that coffee was originally discovered by goats in what is now Ethiopia.
The frenetic antics of the goats attracted the attention of their keeper, a goat herder named Kaldi. The Ethiopians devised various ways to ingest the enervating plant, the most popular of which was in a liquid form. In the sixth century, the Ethiopians invaded and held Yemen for about fifty years and brought coffee with them. Sufi monks were some of the first to seriously adopt the practice of imbibing the drink as it made staying awake for midnight prayers easier. By the fifteenth century, Muslim pilgrims had carried the drink throughout the Islamic world, Persia, Egypt, Turkey, and North Africa.