A porridge of roasted coffee cherries mixed with butter and salt called Buna Kelema. Multiple, conflicting myths of coffee’s origins. Hallucinogenic chat leaves. How Christians vilified coffee, but then glorified it. How Muslims ritualized coffee, and embraced it. People of wisdom, courtesy, and tradition. Kidnapped girls forced to marry; high infant-mortality rates. Rainforest highlands, barren desert, and agricultural wealth. It’s all here, and more: the Ethiopian story. The coffee maven, adventurer, climber, and anthropologist Majka Burhardt paints vivid word-pictures to accompany Travis and Helmut Horn’s breathtaking photos. Coffee Story: Ethiopia carries us into the heart of the land where coffee originated, with all its glory, mystery, contradiction, and potential.

Mark Pendergrast, author, Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World

Can you imagine a world without coffee? No—it is impossible to do so, because the coffee bean, in the way Majka Burhardt explains, has permanently and irrevocably entered our lives. To understand more about this remarkable bean, you must remember that it originates in mountainous Ethiopia, long regarded as one of the world’s most mysterious countries. Coffee is so vital to us all that it makes this book, the first modern study of the bean, uniquely important—and I recommend the pages herein to anyone in quest of knowledge, enlightenment, and entertainment.

Professor Richard Pankhurst, author, Economic History of Ethiopia (1968) and A Social History of Ethiopia (1990)

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