The History of Coffee: From Yemen’s Sufis to the World’s Cup

Coffee the plant is Ethiopian; coffee the drink is, as far as the record shows, Yemeni. There is no confirmed historical or archaeological evidence of anyone drinking coffee before the 15th century. By the late 1400s it was well established among Sufi communities in Yemen, and from there it spread through Mecca, Cairo and Istanbul, across the Mediterranean to Venice and London, and finally around the world on colonial ships.

The real history is better than the legends, and easier to follow once you separate the two.

A plant from Ethiopia

Arabica coffee formed in the forests of Ethiopia hundreds of thousands of years ago — a 2024 genome study dates the hybridisation that created it to more than 600,000 years ago — and it still grows wild there. The Ethiopian coffee guide covers that deep history.

People in the region may well have used the plant long before anyone wrote about it, chewing the cherries or the leaves. But for coffee as a drink, the trail begins across the Red Sea.

The first coffee drinkers: Yemen's Sufis

The earliest credible accounts place coffee drinking among Sufi communities in Yemen in the 15th century. One figure often named is the scholar Jamal al-Din al-Dhabhani, said to have taken up the drink around 1454. The Sufis used coffee to stay awake through night-time prayer and devotion, and it moved along the networks of their orders.

From Yemen it spread through the Islamic world: to Mecca and Medina, to Cairo, and on into the growing Ottoman Empire.

Mocha and the monopoly

For two centuries, almost all of the world's coffee came from Yemen, and it left through one port: Mocha (al-Makha) on the Red Sea coast. Until the end of the 17th century, Mocha was effectively the world's only gateway for coffee. The name stuck so firmly that "mocha" became a word for coffee itself — and later, for a coffee drink made with chocolate.

Yemen's control of the trade was valuable, and other powers wanted coffee they could grow themselves. That monopoly would not last.

Bans and coffeehouses

Coffee's spread was not smooth. In 1511, conservative scholars at a court in Mecca banned coffee for its stimulating effects. The ban did not hold, and the Ottoman authorities overturned such bans in 1524. It was the first of many attempts to restrict coffee or the places where people drank it.

Those places mattered more than the drink. The coffeehouse was a new kind of public space: somewhere to talk, read, play games and argue, outside the home and the mosque. In Istanbul, coffee was in use by 1539, and the city's first coffeehouse is said to have opened in 1554 — some say 1551 — started by two merchants from Aleppo and Damascus. Coffeehouses became central to Ottoman social life, and to rulers' anxieties about gossip and dissent. Coffee itself became part of Turkish culture deeply enough that UNESCO recognised it in 2013 — see the Turkish coffee guide.

Europe catches on

Coffee reached Europe through trade with the Ottoman world, and Venice, the great trading city, was among the first to take it up. The first coffeehouse in mainland Europe opened in Venice in 1645.

England followed quickly. Its first coffeehouse opened in Oxford in 1650, and London's soon after, run by Pasqua Rosée in St Michael's Alley. English coffeehouses became famous as "penny universities", places where for the price of a coffee anyone could join conversations about politics, science and commerce.

There are legends from this period too. One story has Pope Clement VIII tasting coffee and approving it for Christians; it is not clear whether it is true.

Breaking the monopoly

The Dutch were determined to grow coffee themselves. A Dutch merchant, Pieter van den Broecke, obtained coffee plants from Mocha in 1616, and they were grown in the botanical garden in Amsterdam.

The decisive step came in Asia. Between 1696 and 1699, coffee seeds were taken from India's Malabar coast to Java, then a Dutch colony, and plantations followed. A coffee plant reached Amsterdam's botanical garden in 1706, and in 1718 one was shared with France. From those few plants came much of the coffee later grown in the Americas — the coffee varieties guide traces the Typica lineage that descends from them.

The Americas

The French brought coffee to the Caribbean. In the early 1720s, the naval officer Gabriel de Clieu carried coffee seedlings to Martinique, and coffee spread through the French and other Caribbean colonies from there.

In 1727, Francisco de Melo Palheta established Brazil's first coffee plantation, with seeds obtained from French Guiana. Brazil would become the largest coffee producer in the world, a position it still holds.

This expansion had a human cost that should not be left out of the story. Coffee plantations in the Caribbean and Brazil were built on the labour of enslaved Africans, and colonial coffee economies elsewhere relied on forced and coerced labour. The cheap coffee that transformed European daily life was paid for by them.

The legend of Kaldi

The most famous coffee origin story is about Kaldi, an Ethiopian goatherd who noticed his goats dancing after eating the red cherries of a certain shrub, tried them himself, and brought them to a monastery.

It is a charming story and almost certainly not history. It first appears in 1671, in a Latin treatise by Antoine Faustus Nairon, a Maronite professor in Rome — about two centuries after coffee drinking is documented in Yemen. The name "Kaldi" itself seems to have been attached to the story later still.

The rest of the story

From the 18th century onwards, coffee became a global commodity, grown across the tropics and drunk everywhere. The 20th century brought instant coffee, the espresso machine and, eventually, the specialty coffee movement, with its attention to origin, variety and freshness — the kind of attention this site is built around.

The through-line is the coffeehouse. From Yemeni Sufis keeping each other awake to Ottoman coffeehouses, London's penny universities and today's cafés, coffee has always been as much about where people gather as about what they drink.