The History of Coffee: Origins, Timeline and How It Spread

Coffee comes from the highlands of Ethiopia, where the plant grows wild. The first reliable records of people drinking it come from Yemen in the 1400s, where Sufi monks brewed it to stay awake for night prayers. From there it spread through the Middle East, reached Europe in the 1600s, and was planted across Asia, the Caribbean and Latin America by colonial powers in the 1700s. Today it is grown in some 70 countries and drunk almost everywhere.

Here is the story in order, with a timeline, the legends worth knowing, and what is fact and what is folklore.

Where Coffee Comes From: Ethiopia

Arabica, the species behind most of the world’s coffee, is native to the forests of southwestern Ethiopia and nearby South Sudan, and wild coffee still grows there. Long before anyone brewed it, people there are thought to have chewed the cherries or mixed the beans with fat as an energy food. Coffee is still central to Ethiopian life, as our guides to Ethiopian coffee and the Ethiopian coffee ceremony explain.

The legend of Kaldi

The best-known story says a goat herder named Kaldi noticed his goats dancing with energy after eating red berries from a certain shrub. He told the monks at a nearby monastery, who threw the berries into the fire as the devil’s work, smelled the roasting beans, and brewed the first cup. It is a lovely story, but it is a legend: it first appears in writing in 1671, more than a thousand years after it supposedly happened.

Yemen: Where Coffee Became a Drink

The first solid evidence of coffee as a brewed drink comes from Yemen in the 1400s, where Sufi monks drank it to stay alert during long night prayers. Yemen was also the first place coffee was farmed on a large scale, on terraces in the mountains, and its port of Mocha shipped coffee to the world for two centuries. That is where the name “mocha” comes from. Our Yemen coffee guide covers this period in more depth.

Yemen guarded its monopoly. Beans were reportedly roasted or boiled before export so they could not be planted, which is why the smuggling story of Baba Budan matters: according to legend, the Sufi pilgrim hid seven seeds on his body on the way home from Mecca in the 1600s and planted them in the hills of southern India, where the Chikmagalur region still grows coffee today.

The Ottoman Empire and the First Coffeehouses

In the early 1500s coffee spread to Mecca, Cairo and across the Ottoman Empire, and with it came the coffeehouse: a public place to talk, play games, hear music and swap news. Coffeehouses opened in Istanbul in the 1550s. Authorities in several cities tried to ban them at various times, partly on religious grounds and partly because people gathered there to criticize the rulers, but the bans never lasted. The Ottomans also gave the world a brewing method still used today, which you can try with our guide to Turkish coffee.

Where the word “coffee” comes from

The word traveled with the drink: Arabic qahwa, a word that may first have referred to wine, became Turkish kahve, Italian caffè, Dutch koffie, and finally English “coffee” around 1600.

Coffee Comes to Europe

Venetian merchants, who traded heavily with the Ottomans, brought coffee to Europe in the early 1600s. A popular story says some clergy wanted it banned as a Muslim drink until Pope Clement VIII tasted it and approved. That story is probably legend too, but coffee caught on quickly either way.

England’s first coffeehouses opened in Oxford and London in the 1650s, and within a few decades London had hundreds. They were called “penny universities” because for the price of a cup you could listen to, or join, conversations about politics, science and business. Some turned into institutions: Lloyd’s of London, the insurance market, began in Edward Lloyd’s coffeehouse in the 1680s. Coffeehouses spread through Paris, Vienna, Amsterdam and the rest of Europe in the same period.

How Coffee Spread Around the World

Europeans did not want to depend on Yemen, so they took coffee to their colonies. The Dutch planted it on Java, in today’s Indonesia, in the late 1600s, which is why “java” became slang for coffee. A coffee tree from Java was given to the King of France in the early 1700s, and in the 1720s a French naval officer, Gabriel de Clieu, carried a seedling from it to Martinique in the Caribbean. Around the same time, coffee was taken from French Guiana to Brazil.

Coffee plantations spread across the Caribbean, Central and South America, and later East Africa. It is an uncomfortable but important part of the story: much of this expansion depended on the forced labor of enslaved people, particularly in the Caribbean and Brazil. By the mid-1800s Brazil had become the world’s largest producer, and it still grows far more coffee than any other country, followed by Vietnam. Our articles on Brazilian coffee and robusta in Vietnam pick up those stories.

Coffee in America

Coffee reached the American colonies in the 1600s, but tea was the more popular drink until the 1770s. After the Boston Tea Party in 1773, drinking coffee instead of British tea became a patriotic choice, and the young United States grew into one of the world’s biggest coffee markets. Cheap coffee from Latin America, the Civil War, when soldiers relied on it, and new canned and pre-ground brands in the late 1800s made it an everyday drink.

The Modern Era: Espresso, Instant and Specialty Coffee

The 1900s changed how coffee was made. Italian inventors developed the espresso machine in the early 1900s, and our guide to espresso covers that story. In Germany, Melitta Bentz invented the paper coffee filter in 1908. Instant coffee became a mass product after Nestlé launched Nescafé in 1938, as our history of instant coffee explains.

From the 1960s, a reaction against cheap, stale coffee started the specialty coffee movement: small roasters, fresh beans, and attention to where coffee is grown and how it is processed. Coffee people describe this history in “waves”, from mass-market cans to coffee-shop chains to today’s single-origin, light-roast cafés. Our guide to the first, second and third waves of coffee tells that part of the story.

Why Do We Drink Coffee?

The short answer is caffeine. It blocks adenosine, a chemical that builds up in the brain during the day and makes us feel tired, so coffee makes people feel more alert. That is exactly why Yemen’s monks first drank it. But caffeine alone does not explain coffee’s place in the world. From the first coffeehouses in Istanbul and London to a café on any street corner today, coffee has always been as much about meeting people, talking and taking a break as about staying awake. Our caffeine guide covers how much is in each cup.

Common Questions

Who discovered coffee?

Nobody knows. The plant comes from Ethiopia, where people probably used it long before written records. The story of Kaldi the goat herder is a legend first written down in 1671.

When did people start drinking coffee?

The earliest reliable evidence of coffee as a brewed drink comes from Yemen in the 1400s.

When did coffee come to Europe and America?

Europe in the early 1600s, through Venice; England’s first coffeehouses opened in the 1650s. It reached the American colonies in the 1600s and became the favorite American drink after the 1770s.

Which country grows the most coffee?

Brazil, by a wide margin, followed by Vietnam. Both grow very different coffee: Brazil mostly Arabica, Vietnam mostly Robusta. See our guide to Arabica vs Robusta.

Further Reading

• Mark Pendergrast, Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World (Basic Books).
• William H. Ukers, All About Coffee (1922), the classic early history, now in the public domain.