Tanzania’s coffee output may fall as much as 27 percent in the year through June 2012 as drought in the East African nation cuts yields, the country’s coffee board said.

Production for marketing in Tanzania, Africa’s fifth- biggest grower of the beans, may range from 40,000 metric tons to 45,000 tons next year, compared with just over 55,000 tons expected this season, Adolph Kumburu, the director general of the Moshi-based agency, said today by e-mail.

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The history of coffee goes at least as far back as the thirteenth century, though coffee's origin remains unclear.

It has been believed that Ethiopian ancestors of today's Oromo people were the first to discover and recognize the energizing effect of the coffee bean plant.^[1] However, no direct evidence has been found indicating where in Africa coffee grew or who among the natives might have used it, or even known about it, earlier than the 17th century.^[1] The story of Kaldi, the 9th-century Ethiopian goatherd who discovered coffee, did not appear in writing until 1671 AD and is probably apocryphal.^[2] From Ethiopia, coffee was said to have spread to Egyptand Yemen.^[3] The earliest credible evidence of either coffee drinking or knowledge of the coffee tree appears in the middle of the fifteenth century, in the Sufi monasteries of Yemen.^[1]It was in Arabia that coffee beans were first roasted and brewed, similar to modern preparation. By the 16th century, it had reached the rest of the Middle East, Persia, Turkey, ...