The History of Coffee

People drink about two billion cups of coffee every day. But coffee is not that old as a drink.

The coffee plant comes from Ethiopia, in East Africa. An old story says a goat farmer called Kaldi saw his goats eating red berries and becoming very active. He tried the berries too. Nobody knows if the story is true.

By the 1400s, people in Yemen were growing coffee and making a hot drink from the beans. Coffee then travelled north to cities like Cairo and Istanbul. "Coffee houses" opened — places to drink coffee, talk, play games, and share news.

In the 1600s, coffee reached Europe. Coffee houses in London and Paris became popular places for business and conversation. Later, Europeans grew coffee in their colonies in South America and Asia.

Today, Brazil, Vietnam and Colombia grow the most coffee. Millions of small farmers depend on it.

Few drinks have shaped social life as much as coffee, and yet as a global habit it is only a few centuries old.

The plant is native to the forests of south-western Ethiopia, where its stimulating berries were known long before anyone brewed them. The familiar drink took shape in 15th-century Yemen, where Sufi communities used it to stay alert during night-time prayer. From the ports of the Red Sea, coffee spread through the Ottoman world, and with it a new kind of public space: the coffee house, where men gathered to talk, do business, listen to music and argue about politics. Authorities were often suspicious of these places precisely because they encouraged discussion.

Coffee reached Western Europe in the 17th century and the pattern repeated. London's coffee houses became known as "penny universities" — for the price of a cup you could sit and listen to informed conversation. Several institutions, including a famous insurance market, grew out of them.

European powers then broke the Arabian monopoly by planting coffee in their tropical colonies, and the centre of production shifted to the Americas and South-East Asia. That colonial history still shapes the modern industry: a commodity grown mostly by smallholders in the global South and consumed, at a large markup, in the wealthier North.

It is tempting to treat coffee as a timeless fixture of human culture, but its rise is recent and its history revealing. The plant evolved in the Ethiopian highlands, where the psychoactive properties of its fruit were understood well before the practice of roasting and infusing the seed emerged. That practice is usually placed in 15th-century Yemen, among Sufi orders who valued the drink for sustaining concentration through long nocturnal devotions — an early instance of a stimulant being adopted for its usefulness to a particular kind of work.

What followed is a case study in how a beverage can carry social consequences. As coffee moved through the Ottoman cities and then into Europe, it brought with it the coffee house: a semi-public space, relatively cheap to enter, where strangers of different ranks could sit together and exchange news, gossip, commercial intelligence and political opinion. Rulers repeatedly tried to suppress or license these establishments, correctly perceiving that a venue for unsupervised conversation among the literate classes had political potential. In London, the coffee house incubated newspapers, joint-stock ventures and the insurance market that became Lloyd's.

The economic geography of coffee was then reorganised by empire. To escape dependence on Arabian supply, European states established plantations across their tropical colonies, frequently using coerced or enslaved labour, and the locus of production migrated permanently to Latin America and later South-East Asia.

That inheritance persists. Coffee remains a crop cultivated overwhelmingly by smallholders in lower-income countries and consumed, with most of the value added downstream, in richer ones — a structure that fair-trade schemes and direct-sourcing models attempt, with mixed success, to rebalance.