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  • Tasting Notes
    Koss, Erika

    The Virginia quarterly review, 12/2021, Volume: 97, Issue: 4
    Journal Article

    Koss asserts that seventy percent of the world's coffee is misnamed, thanks to a story created by a Swedish botanist. Obsessed with classifying plants, when Carl Linnaeus saw a dried coffee branch in a greenhouse in the Netherlands, he knew it wasn't Jasminum arabicum, as a French botanist had named it. Linnaeus created a new genus: Coffea. But for all his taxonomical specificity, he was wrong about its epithet, for when he published its full name as Coffea arabica in 1753, he didn't know that its origin wasn't anywhere in Arabia. The seed came first from Africa, in the Kaffa region of southwestern Ethiopia, once called Abyssinia. Later, even after Linnaeus acknowledged Ethiopia as its birthplace, it was too late. The misnomer lingers on. Still, trees blossomed white flowers, covering Kenya with the scent of jasmine honeysuckle. Flowers transform to plump red cherries. The seed inside will become green coffee that ships from port to port, passing through dozens of hands before it is roasted brown and transformed into drink.