Coffee and tea have completely disimilar origins. Tea was widely used all through Asia and the Middle East before coffee was discovered in Ethiopia.

The origin of tea is a bit harder to pin down and it is agreed in the beverage community that tea may have actually evolved in three seperate regions all at the same time. It is, however, well known that by the time Marco Polo went to China, the Indians, Chinese and Middle Easterners all had tea already.

However, coffee originated in Ethiopia and was discovered by a goat herder. Originally, coffee wasn't even brewed. The coffee cherries were picked and eaten. However, it was discovered that, by eating the seeds, you could get a good caffeine buzz going, so people began to roast the seeds of the coffee cherries and eat them. It wasn't until the Europeans got ahold of coffee that the brewing process became widely known. Certainly, some of these bush people that had discovered the roasting probably had figured out to brew it already, but most reports speculate that it was the Europeans, the Egyptians, or the Turkish that first ground coffee and brewed it in water.

So, as you can see, coffee is not failed tea. It was a completely seperate evolutionary process altogether. Oddly enough, aspirin was discovered much in the same way.

And speaking of coffee, I think it's about time I had some.