He made it to the Polish troops and delivered the message. The Poles came to the aid of Vienna, and together they drove back the Ottoman siege. In their retreat, the Turks left much of what they’d brought with them, including twenty-five thousand tents, five thousand camels, ten thousand oxen and five hundred bags of small, hard green beans. The Poles assumed the beans were camel feed, but Kolshitsky knew better. These were coffee beans; in the Arab world he’d seen them roasted and brewed. As a reward for his heroism, he was allowed to keep the beans, and with them he opened the first
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