Dubai Spills The Beans

Sipping Coffee From Around The World At The U.A.E’s First Coffee Museum

- Charukesi Ramadurai

It is a sobering thought that I owe my productive existence to a bunch of dancing goats in faraway Ethiopia. Without my morning cuppa of joe (or three), I can barely be called a sentient human being even though I am up and about through the day.

Now, about those goats: Legend has it that centuries ago in Ethiopia, a goatherd named Kaldi noticed his goats getting rather frisky after eating a particular kind of red berries. A brew made of the same red berries apparently helped monks at a local monastery stay awake through night-time prayers. Few hundred years later these berries found their way to the port of Mocha in Yemen, where locals roasted them and made a beverage—the earliest version of coffee as we know it was born.

Beginning sometime in A.D. 1400, the coffee juggernaut rolled unstopped from Yemen to countries like Egypt, to Turkey and Europe though the Ottoman Empire, and then to South America. Coffee beans are said to have travelled to India in the folds of 17th-century Sufi saint Baba Budan’s garments. On his way home to Chikmagalur, Karnataka, from a pilgrimage to Mecca, he came across the beans in Mocha and carried some back.

While I already knew some of these facts about my favourite beverage, I have just learnt a lot more at the newly opened Coffee Museum in Dubai, the first of its kind in the Middle East. It is housed in a refurbished traditional Emirati home tucked away in the heritage Al-Bastakiya neighbourhood, also known as Al Fahidi Historical District. Filled with quirky cafés and vibrant art galleries, this area in old Dubai, which was established by Persian pearl merchants in the 19th century, is an ideal setting for this museum that was built up over seven years.