The History of Coffee: From Yemen's Sufis to Brazil

Coffee began as a wild forest plant in Ethiopia, but the history of coffee as a drink starts in Yemen, where Sufi communities were brewing roasted beans by the late fifteenth century. Nothing written or dug up shows anyone drinking it earlier. The famous goatherd who saw his flock dance is a much later story, and his name may be a twentieth-century addition.

Where did coffee come from before the first cup?

The plant is older than the drink. A 2020 genomic study by Scalabrin and colleagues describes Coffea arabica as indigenous to Ethiopia and South Sudan, and notes that the coffee grown around the world spread from Yemen rather than from that original homeland. Britannica gives the same route: wild plants, probably from Kefa in Ethiopia, were taken to southern Arabia and put under cultivation in the fifteenth century.

That gap matters. People in the Ethiopian highlands may have eaten or chewed the fruit for centuries, but no historian has produced a dated document or an excavated find showing the roasted-and-brewed drink before the 1400s. The tidy line from forest to cup is an inference, not a record.

Kaldi and the dancing goats: the legend, checked

In the usual telling, an Ethiopian goatherd named Kaldi, around the year 850, watches his goats frisk after eating red berries, tries them himself, and shares the news with the world. Britannica repeats it as one of many legends. The earliest version anyone has found is Latin, printed in Rome in 1671, in a treatise by the Maronite scholar Antoine Faustus Nairon. His herder looks after camels or goats, lives in Arabia Felix (Yemen, not Ethiopia), and has no name.

The name came later. The historian George van Driem writes that no historical source on coffee mentions a goatherd called Kaldi, and traces the name's spread to William Ukers's 1922 book All About Coffee. Weinberg and Bealer argue that the tale dresses up an older and more believable tradition about a Sufi who first met coffee in Ethiopia. So the story is probably apocryphal, and the date of 850 has nothing behind it.

Sufis, Yemen and the first cultivation

The earliest credible accounts of coffee drinking, according to Hattox, come from Yemen, where Sufi communities grew the plant and prepared a drink from its roasted beans. The historian Tuchscherer dates the first significant cultivation there to the fifteenth century, when coffee served as both an aid to devotion and a trade item. Haraz and Bani Matar are named as the early growing districts.

A later Arabic manuscript, Umdat al-safwa by Abd al-Qadir al-Jaziri (1587), traces coffee from Yemen to Mecca, Medina, Cairo, Damascus, Baghdad and Constantinople. It says Jamal al-Din al-Dhabhani, a mufti of Aden who died in 1470, adopted coffee around 1454. That is a tradition recorded more than a century after the fact, but it fits the fifteenth-century picture. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Yemen was the main exporter, with the port of Mocha handling the trade. Until the close of the 1600s, Britannica says, nearly all the world's supply came from there.

Bans in Mecca, Cairo and Istanbul

A drink that kept people awake and drew them together was bound to worry someone. In 1511, conservative imams in Mecca banned coffee for its stimulating effect. In 1524 the Ottoman Sultan Suleiman overturned that ruling with a fatwa from his chief jurist, Mehmed Ebussuud. A similar prohibition in Cairo in 1532 ended with coffeehouses and bean warehouses being sacked. Further attempts to restrict or tax it followed under Selim II in 1567 and Murad III in 1583.

Britannica notes the irony: some Islamic authorities called the drink intoxicating and therefore forbidden, while many Muslims took it up as a substitute for alcohol. Despite the threat of severe penalties, it spread, and it produced a new place to sit, the coffeehouse.

The first coffeehouses of Istanbul and London

The Ottoman chronicler Ibrahim Pecevi, writing in the 1640s, says two merchants, Hakem of Aleppo and Shems of Damascus, opened the first Istanbul coffeehouses in the Tahtakale district, around 1554 to 1555. Such places became known as "schools of wisdom."

In London the first one is credited to Pasqua Rosee, servant to Daniel Edwards, a trader in Ottoman goods, in 1652. Rosee is described variously as Greek, Armenian or Turkish. Entry could cost as little as a penny, which bought access to books and printed news and gave the "penny universities" their nickname. Underwriters of ship insurance gathered at Lloyd's Coffee House, which led to the Lloyd's of London insurance market. In 1773 stockbrokers at New Jonathan's renamed it "The Stock Exchange."

By 1675, England had more than 3,000 coffeehouses, by one count, and Charles II tried to suppress them as meeting places for "idle and disaffected persons." The attempt did not last. Britannica says that by the end of the 1600s coffeehouses were flourishing across Britain, the American colonies and continental Europe.

Did a pope really bless coffee?

Some churchmen in Europe opposed coffee as the "Devil's drink," and the tale goes that Pope Clement VIII tasted it, liked it and approved it, usually dated to 1600. Historians cannot say whether this happened, and no source read for this article quotes the pope. The popular line about baptizing the drink to cheat Satan is left out for that reason.

What is documented is slower. Charles de l'Ecluse printed the first mention of coffee in a European text in 1575. Prospero Alpini described the plant in 1591. The first coffeehouse on the European mainland opened in Venice in 1645.

Plantations, slavery and Brazil

Demand outran Yemen. Cultivation reached Java in the seventeenth century and the Americas in the eighteenth, in Britannica's account. In Brazil, tradition says Francisco de Melo Palheta planted the first bush in Para in 1727, after smuggling seeds out of French Guiana, though the account of that smuggling is itself presented as a legend.

Coffee grew mostly for home use in Brazil until the early 1800s, then boomed from the 1830s to the 1850s. The historian Eakin reports that Brazil imported about 1.5 million enslaved people in the first half of the nineteenth century. The foreign slave trade was outlawed in 1850, and slavery itself was formally abolished in 1888, though that did not end harsh labor practices. Brazil made up roughly 20 percent of world coffee output in the 1820s and about 40 percent in the 1840s, when it became the largest producer, according to Bethell. It remains one of the biggest.

Tea and sugar followed their own routes through the same ports and colonies; see the history of tea and the history of sugar. Another plantation crop of the same era is covered in the history of chocolate, and Ethiopia's own food traditions appear in the history of Ethiopian injera.

Who still counts the cups

Brazil's share kept rising after abolition: by the 1920s it supplied around 80 percent of the world's coffee, and today it grows about a third.

Questions people ask

Who discovered coffee?

No one person is documented. The best evidence points to Sufi communities in Yemen in the fifteenth century, working with plants brought from Ethiopia. The goatherd named Kaldi appears in no historical source, according to the scholar George van Driem, and the earliest version of the tale, from 1671, gives the herder no name.

Where was coffee first grown?

Coffea arabica is native to Ethiopia and South Sudan, but the first known cultivation happened in Yemen in the fifteenth century. Tuchscherer names Haraz and Bani Matar as early centers. Yemen supplied nearly all the world's coffee, shipped from Mocha, until the end of the seventeenth century.

When did coffee reach Europe?

Europeans first wrote about coffee in 1575, when Charles de l'Ecluse published a mention of it. Prospero Alpini described the plant in 1591. Venice opened the first coffeehouse on the European mainland in 1645, and Pasqua Rosee opened London's first in 1652.

Was coffee ever banned?

Yes, repeatedly. Mecca's imams banned it in 1511 and Cairo had a similar ban in 1532, which led to coffeehouses and bean warehouses being sacked. Sultan Suleiman overturned the Mecca ruling in 1524. Charles II tried to suppress English coffeehouses in the 1670s, and the effort failed.

Filed under Trade Routes