History

The history of coffee: from Yemen to your kitchen

Updated November 6, 2026 · 3 min read

The story everyone tells starts with a goat. The story historians can prove starts with monks in Yemen who needed to stay awake at night.

The legend of the dancing goats

You have probably heard of Kaldi, the Ethiopian goatherd whose animals danced after eating red berries from a shrub. It is a lovely story, but it is a late one. The earliest written version appears only in 1671, in a Latin book on coffee by Antoine Faustus Nairon printed in Rome, and in that first account the herder has no name at all. Historians treat the tale as a legend, not as evidence.

What is certain is that the coffee plant, Coffea arabica, grows wild in the highlands of Ethiopia. How and when people first used it there is not documented.

Yemen: coffee as a night-time drink for prayer

The first solid evidence of people drinking coffee comes from Yemen in the 15th century. Sufi communities there drank it to stay alert during night-time devotions. The Arab writer al-Jaziri says that a mufti of Aden, Jamal al-Din al-Dhabhani, was the first to adopt it, around 1454. There is no confirmed evidence of coffee drinking before the 15th century.

From Yemen the drink spread with pilgrims and traders to Mecca and Cairo. The port of Mocha on the Red Sea gave its name to coffee for centuries.

Banned in Mecca, saved by a sultan

Coffee was controversial from the start. In 1511 a theological court in Mecca banned it because of its stimulating effect, and because coffeehouses were places where people gathered and talked. The ban did not last: in 1524 the Ottoman sultan Suleiman I overturned it, backed by a fatwa that allowed coffee.

The first coffeehouses

According to the Ottoman chronicler İbrahim Peçevi, the first coffeehouse in Istanbul opened in 1554 (some sources say 1555) in the Tahtakale district, run by two Arab merchants. Coffeehouses quickly became the place to read, play games, listen to poetry and discuss the news. That social role is still at the heart of Turkish coffee culture, which UNESCO lists as intangible heritage.

Europe followed a century later:

• 1645: the first coffeehouse in mainland Europe opens in Venice.
• 1650: England's first coffeehouse opens in Oxford. London's first, run by Pasqua Rosée, opens in St Michael's Alley in the City.
• 1685: Johannes Diodato receives the first documented licence to serve coffee publicly in Vienna.

From one plant to plantations around the world

For a long time Yemen controlled the supply. That changed when Europeans carried plants to their colonies:

• 1616: Pieter van den Broecke brings coffee bushes from Mocha to the botanical garden in Amsterdam.
• 1658: the Dutch start growing coffee in Ceylon (today Sri Lanka), and later on Java. By 1719 "Java coffee" could supply Europe's demand.
• 1720: the French officer Gabriel de Clieu takes seedlings to Martinique in the Caribbean.
• 1727: Francisco de Melo Palheta brings seeds to Brazil. By 1852 Brazil is the world's largest producer, and it still is today.

This expansion has a dark side that should not be skipped. By 1788 the French colony of Saint-Domingue (today Haiti) supplied about half of the world's coffee, grown by enslaved people. Much of the early coffee trade in the Americas rested on slavery.

America switches from tea to coffee

After the Boston Tea Party of 1773, drinking tea became unpatriotic for many Americans, and many switched to coffee during the Revolution.

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