And one story that always kind of captures my imagination.

The street's lost culture. And you're listening to Kearning cultures. Today, producer

producer Noon Sala has a story for us about my personal favorite way to wake up in the morning.

I just checked one before coming in front of the mic, actually.

And it's a story about coffee.

We've covered coffee on the show before.

Long time, Kernan Culture's listeners might even hear a familiar voice in this episode, but today we wanted to explore coffee not as the drink, but through the ways in which it ties with history, culture, and religion in all of our lives.

Noon spoke with three different people for today's episode, each of whom have a very different connection to coffee.

But to start, the thing that got Noon interested in this story in the first place was this

connection between coffee and Sufism, a more mystical interpretation and tradition in Islam.

There are quite a few variations of the story behind the whole Sufi coffee connection

throughout history. One version talks about how whole Sufi coffee connection throughout history, one version

talks about how this Sufi cleric was traveling through Ethiopia, and he saw some birds

behaving strangely after eating some berries off a plant. So then he tried the berries himself

and noticed their ability to kind of, to keep him alert.

Another version of this connection is about a Sufi shepherd who noticed that his goats after

eating the berries had the same effect on them.

So whichever it was, sometime between the 13th and 16th century, Sufi clerics in Yemen, after discovering coffee's

effect, drank it as a stimulant to keep them awake and alert into the night during Vikid.

Vakr in this instance is an act of worship in Sufi prayer through dancing, spinning, and

or loud repetitive chanting, often inducing a meditative

state. And so the first person that Noon wanted to speak to for this story was somebody who could tell

...