The history of coffee spans many centuries. Wild coffee plants originated in Ethiopia, while the beverage itself has its roots in Yemen, where it was harvested, roasted and brewed; Sufi Muslims in the 15th century used it to aid concentration during night prayers. From Yemen, coffee spread to Mecca and the wider Arabian Peninsula, and by the early 16th century it had reached Cairo, Damascus, and Istanbul. Debates over its permissibility arose in Muslim society, but it soon became a central part of urban social life. Through Mediterranean trade routes, coffee entered Europe in the mid-16th century, first in Italy and later in other regions. Coffee houses were established in Western Europe by the late 17th century, especially in Holland, England, and Germany. Up to the end of the 17th century, the Yemeni port of Mocha was the world’s sole gateway for coffee, but as demand grew, cultivation spread to other parts of the world. One of the earliest cultivations of coffee in the New World was when Gabriel de Clieu brought coffee seedlings to Martinique in 1720, from which it spread to other Caribbean islands such as Saint-Domingue and also to Mexico. By 1788, Saint-Domingue supplied half the world's coffee.
By 1852, Brazil became the world's largest producer of coffee and has held that status ever since. Since 1950, several other major producers emerged, notably Colombia, Ivory Coast, Ethiopia, and Vietnam; the latter overtook Colombia and became the second-largest producer in 1999. Today, coffee is one of the world's most popular beverages, with a significant cultural and economic impact globally.
Etymology The word coffee entered English from the Ottoman Turkish ḳahve (قهوه), borrowed in turn from the Arabic qahwah (قَهْوَة). Qahwah most likely meant 'dark', referring to the brew or the bean: Semitic languages have the root qhh, "dark color". Medieval Arab lexicographers traditionally held that the etymology of qahwah meant 'wine', given its distinctly dark color, and derived from the verb qahiya (قَهِيَ), 'to have no appetite'. Etymologies include the Ethiopian province of Kaffa in Abyssinia, part of the plant's native region and origin of discovery, and the Arabic quwwa ("power"). The Turkish kahve also inspired caffè in Italian, café in French, and koffie in Dutch, which all emerged at roughly the same time, reflecting the beverage's rapid spread across Europe. The Ethiopian word for coffee is buna, bun, būn, Buni which comes from the word for the color brown in Amharic, Tigrinya and Arabic. The word group has been assumed to originate from early Semitic languages bunn (بن). The terms coffee pot and coffee break originated in 1705 and 1952 respectively.
Genetics The original domesticated coffee plant is said to have been from Harar, and the native plant population is thought to be derived from Ethiopia with distinct nearby populations in Sudan and Kenya. Genetic studies have been performed on Coffea arabica varieties, which were found to be of low genetic diversity but retaining of some residual heterozygosity from ancestral materials, and closely related diploid species Coffea canephora and C. liberica; however, no direct evidence of coffee's existence or use has been found from earlier than the seventeenth century. A 2020 follow-up study definitively confirmed that the vast majority of Coffea arabica plants originate from early varieties in the coffee farms of Yemen.
History
Spread of coffee The earliest mention of coffee noted by the literary coffee merchant Philippe Sylvestre Dufour is a reference to bunchum in the works of the 10th century Persian physician al-Razi, known as Rhazes in the West. According to later accounts, bunchum was made from a root rather than from coffee beans. There is no confirmed evidence, either historical or archaeological, of coffee as a drink being consumed before the 15th century. The beverage appears to be a relatively recent development. By the late 15th century, coffee drinking was well established among Sufi communities in Yemen. More definite information on the coffee tree and preparation of a beverage from the roasted coffee berries dates back to the late 15th century. The Sufi Imam Muhammad Ibn Said al-Dhabhani is known to have imported goods from Ethiopia to Yemen. One of the most important of the early writers on coffee was Abd al-Qadir al-Jaziri, who, in 1587, compiled a work tracing the history and legal controversies of coffee entitled Umdat al Safwa fi hill al-qahwa (عمدة الصفوة في حل القهوة), tracing the spread of coffee from Arabia Felix (present-day Yemen) northward to Mecca and Medina, and then to the larger cities of Cairo, Damascus, Baghdad, and Constantinople. He reported that one Sheikh, Jamal-al-Din al-Dhabhani (d. 1470), mufti of Aden, was the first to adopt the use of coffee (circa 1454).
He found that among its properties was that it drove away fatigue and lethargy, and brought to the body a certain sprightliness and vigour, aiding in the early work at the time. Al-Jaziri's manuscript work is of considerable interest with regard to the history of coffee in Europe as well. A copy reached the French royal library, where it was translated in part by Antoine Galland as De l'origine et du progrès du café (1699). Sufis in Yemen used the beverage as an aid to concentration and as a kind of spiritual intoxication when they chanted the name of God. Sufis used it to keep themselves alert during their nighttime devotions. By 1414, the plant was known in Mecca, and, in the early 1500s, was spreading to the Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt and North Africa from the Yemeni port of Mocha. Associated with Sufism, a myriad of coffee houses popped up in Cairo around the religious Al-Azhar University. These coffee houses also opened in Syria, especially in the cosmopolitan city of Aleppo, and then in Constantinople, the capital of the Ottoman Empire, in 1554. Coffee was also noted in Aleppo by the German physician botanist Leonhard Rauwolf, the first European to mention it, as chaube, in 1573; Rauwolf was closely followed by descriptions from other European travellers. According to the Ottoman chronicler Ibrahim Peçevi, coffee reached Istanbul in 1554, when two Arab merchants, Hakem of Aleppo and Shems of Damascus, opened the first coffeehouse in the Tahtakale district of Istanbul.
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