The Story of Coffee

Origins in Ethiopia

Arabica coffee, the species behind most specialty coffee, is native to the montane rainforests of southwestern Ethiopia. Botanists describe those forests as the plant's primary center of diversity and the origin of all Arabica grown around the world today ²³. Wild coffee still grows there.

You have probably heard the story of Kaldi, the Ethiopian goat herder who saw his goats turn lively after nibbling red berries from a shrub and took the fruit to a local monastery ¹⁴. *This is a legend, not history.* It is a charming story and coffee people love to tell it, but it isn't a historical record ¹⁴.

What the evidence does show is that coffee as a brewed drink appears in the historical record in Yemen, across the Red Sea, in the 1400s ³⁵. That's where our story picks up.

Yemen and the Sufi monasteries

The earliest credible evidence of people drinking coffee comes from the Sufi communities of Yemen in the mid-1400s ³⁵. Sufis are Muslim mystics, and their devotions often ran late into the night with long sessions of chanting and prayer. A cup of qahwa helped them stay alert through those hours ³⁵⁸. Through these religious networks, coffee drinking spread well beyond the monasteries ³⁸.

By the 15th century coffee was being grown in Yemen ¹³. Yemen did more than drink coffee. It became the first real coffee economy, and for a long time it was the starting point of the coffee trade ³⁴. The Red Sea port of Mocha became the hub where beans were bought, sold and shipped ³⁴. The name stuck: when a menu says "mocha" today, it is borrowing the name of that Yemeni harbor town ⁴.

Mecca, Cairo and Istanbul

In the 1500s coffee spread across the Islamic world, through Mecca, Egypt, Syria, Persia and the Ottoman lands ¹⁴⁶. Not everyone approved. In 1511 Khair Beg, the governor of Mecca, tried to ban coffee, but the ban did not last ⁶⁷. In 1543 religious authorities in Istanbul condemned coffee, and shipments of beans were reportedly dumped into the sea ⁴⁸.

Still, coffee kept winning. Istanbul got its first coffeehouses in the mid-1550s, in the Tahtakale district ⁸⁹. The Ottoman chronicler İbrahim Peçevi described them as lively places where people gathered to read, talk and pass the time ⁴⁹. These public coffeehouses, called qahveh khaneh, became so central to city life that they were nicknamed "schools of the wise" ¹⁴. It was a new kind of public space, and Europe would soon copy it.

Europe's coffeehouses

Coffee reached Europe through trade, and Venice was one of the first places to receive it, in the first half of the 1600s ¹⁷¹⁰. A popular story says Pope Clement VIII tasted the "Muslim drink" and approved it for Christians. That tale is widely repeated, but it is a story, not a documented event ¹⁴. Venice's Caffè Florian opened on St. Mark's Square on December 29, 1720, and it is still serving today ¹³¹⁴.

England's first recorded coffeehouse opened in 1650 at the Angel inn in Oxford, run by a Jewish man named Jacob ¹⁵¹⁶¹⁷. London followed in 1652, when Pasqua Rosee opened a coffeehouse in St. Michael's Alley, Cornhill ¹⁷¹⁸. English coffeehouses earned the nickname "penny universities," because for about a penny you could get a cup and an afternoon of conversation and news ¹¹⁵.

In Paris, Francesco Procopio dei Coltelli founded Le Procope in 1686. It is now the oldest café in the city ¹⁹²⁰. Vienna's coffeehouse tradition began after the Ottoman siege of 1683, when an Armenian named Johannes Diodato (also spelled Theodat) opened the first recognized coffeehouse ¹⁰¹¹. You may also hear that the officer Georg Franz Kolschitzky founded Vienna's coffee culture with beans the retreating army left behind. Treat that one as *legend* ¹⁰¹¹. In 2011 Viennese coffeehouse culture was added to Austria's national inventory of intangible cultural heritage ¹⁰¹².

Java, the Caribbean and Brazil

For a long time Europe bought its coffee through Mocha. In 1616 Dutch traders carried coffee plants out of Mocha ²¹²², and by the end of the 1600s the Dutch were growing coffee on Java, in today's Indonesia ¹²¹. France came next. In 1723 a French naval officer, Gabriel de Clieu, took a seedling from the king's coffee tree in Paris and carried it across the Atlantic to the Caribbean island of Martinique ¹²².

Coffee reached Brazil in 1727. Francisco de Mello Palheta brought it from French Guiana to Pará, in the north of the country ²³²⁴. Over the next century coffee moved south, and by the mid-1800s Brazil had become the world's largest coffee producer ²³²⁵. It still holds that title today ²³²⁴.

That growth has a painful side we shouldn't skip. Brazil's coffee boom relied heavily on enslaved African labor ²⁵. Brazil was the last country in the Western Hemisphere to abolish slavery, in 1888 ²⁵²⁶.

Coffee goes industrial

For most of history people bought green beans and roasted them at home. In the early 1900s that changed fast in the United States, as shoppers switched to roasted, branded coffee sold in packages ²⁷²⁸.

One reason was freshness. Ground coffee goes stale quickly once it meets air. In July 1900 Hills Bros. of San Francisco brought out vacuum-packed coffee, sealing it in cans with the air removed so it kept far longer on the shelf ²⁷²⁸. That let a single roaster sell coffee across the country and abroad ²⁷.

Instant coffee was the next step. Soluble coffee already existed in the early 1900s ³⁰³⁷, but the big moment came in 1938, when Nestlé launched Nescafé ²⁹³⁰. Brands like Folgers and Maxwell House turned coffee into an everyday staple in American homes. Coffee people now call this period the "first wave" ²⁸³⁷.

Espresso is born in Italy

Espresso is younger than most people guess. In 1884 Angelo Moriondo of Turin patented a steam-powered machine for making coffee quickly and showed it at that year's General Exposition in Turin ³¹³²³³. He built only a few machines, for his own coffee businesses ³¹³².

In the early 1900s Luigi Bezzera of Milan improved the design, and Desiderio Pavoni bought his patent and began making the machines commercially. Their "Ideale" machine was shown at the 1906 Milan fair ³³³⁴.

The cup we know today, with its layer of crema, came after World War II. In 1947 Achille Gaggia patented a lever-driven piston that pushed hot water through the coffee at high pressure, without steam, and produced a natural crema ³⁴³⁵. Our product pages cover how modern machines build on these ideas.

Specialty coffee and the "third wave"

If the first wave made coffee convenient, later waves made it personal. Starting in the 1960s, the "second wave" moved coffee out of the can and into specialty cafés and coffee shops ³⁷³⁹. Industry groups grew up around that quality focus. In 2017 the Specialty Coffee Association of America merged with its European counterpart to form today's Specialty Coffee Association ³⁶³⁸.

"Third wave" describes the period, from the 2000s to now, when coffee drinkers started caring where their beans come from and how they were grown, processed and roasted ³⁶³⁷. In practice that means single-origin coffees, lighter roasts that let the bean's character come through, and hand brewing methods such as pour-over and French press ³⁶.

Where did the term come from? It entered coffee-industry vocabulary around the turn of the millennium. Our sources disagree on the exact year and on who used it first, so we won't credit any one person ³⁶³⁷. The idea behind it is simple, though, and it is why we're in this business: good coffee starts with knowing your beans.