The honest answer is that nobody knows who first discovered coffee. The plant, Coffea arabica, grows wild in the highland forests of south-western Ethiopia, and people there may have used its berries long before anyone brewed them. The famous story of Kaldi, the goatherd whose goats danced after eating red berries, is a legend, first written down in Europe in 1671. The earliest reliable evidence of coffee as a drink comes from Sufi communities in Yemen in the mid-1400s. From there, it went on to conquer the world.
The legend: a goatherd and his dancing goats
The story goes like this. In the hills of Ethiopia, a goatherd called Kaldi noticed his goats behaving strangely: leaping, bleating and refusing to settle after nibbling the red berries of a glossy-leaved shrub. Curious, he tried the berries himself and felt the same bright rush of energy. In the most popular version he carried them to a monastery, where a disapproving monk threw them into the fire. The smell of roasting beans filled the room. The beans were raked from the embers, crushed and steeped in hot water, and the monks found they could stay awake through their night prayers.
It is a lovely tale, and almost certainly not history. The earliest known written version of the goat story appears in a Latin treatise on coffee published in Rome in 1671 by Antoine Faustus Nairon, a Maronite scholar, many centuries after the events it describes. The goatherd's name, his homeland, the fire and the date often attached to the story (the 9th century is a favourite) all shift from one retelling to the next. Yemen has legends of its own, including one about a Sufi holy man named Omar who, exiled to the mountains, survived on a broth of coffee berries.
What the evidence shows
Historians trace coffee drinking to the Sufi orders of Yemen in the 15th century. Sixteenth-century Arabic writers, the most important being 'Abd al-Qadir al-Jaziri, describe how Sufis drank qahwa to stay alert through night-time devotions, and credit a Yemeni scholar of the mid-1400s with bringing the habit to Aden. That the plant, or the idea of brewing it, crossed the Red Sea from Ethiopia is likely, but hard to document.
Once it started, coffee moved fast along pilgrim and trade routes. By the early 1500s it was being drunk in Mecca and Cairo. In 1511 the governor of Mecca tried to ban it, uneasy about the gatherings it encouraged, but the ban did not last. Coffee houses opened in Istanbul in the 1550s, and they became places to talk, play games, hear poetry and argue about politics. That pattern would repeat wherever coffee went.
Europe's penny universities
Venetian merchants brought coffee to Europe in the early 1600s. A popular story claims that Pope Clement VIII tasted the new drink and "baptised" it as fit for Christians, a legend with no solid source. What is documented is the coffee-house boom that followed. England's first opened in Oxford around 1650, and London's in 1652. Coffee houses came to be nicknamed "penny universities", because for the price of a cup you could sit, read the news and join the conversation. Some became institutions: Lloyd's of London, the insurance market, grew out of Edward Lloyd's coffee house in the 1680s.
From one port to the whole tropics
For a long time almost all the world's coffee passed through Yemen, and its port of Mocha lent its name to a style of coffee, and later to coffee with chocolate. That monopoly broke when the Dutch began growing coffee in Java in the late 1600s. The French took plants to the Caribbean in the 1720s, and coffee spread through Latin America, an expansion built in large part on enslaved and forced labour. By the 19th century Brazil had become the largest producer in the world, as it still is today.
French colonists brought coffee to Vietnam in the 1800s, and Vietnam is now one of the biggest producers too, mostly of the strong, bitter robusta species. The tall glass of iced coffee with sweet condensed milk you will find on Saigon street corners is a newer chapter of the same story.
Coffee at home, old ways and new
- Buy whole beans and grind just before brewing. Ground coffee loses its aroma within days.
- Get the ratio right. A good starting point for filter or cafetière coffee is about 60 g of coffee per litre of water, or roughly 15 g for a 250 ml mug. Adjust from there.
- Don't use boiling water. Let the kettle rest for 30 seconds or so. Water at around 90–96°C draws out sweetness without harshness.
- Try the Ethiopian way. In a traditional Ethiopian coffee ceremony, green beans are roasted in a pan, ground by hand, brewed in a clay pot called a jebena and served in three rounds. It is a lesson in slowing down.
- Add spice. Cardamom with coffee is traditional across much of the Middle East. Crush a pod or two with the beans.
Caffeine affects everyone differently, and decaffeinated coffee works in almost any recipe. For drinks that follow coffee's route around the map, The Healthy Kitchen is the book to open: there's a Saigon Silk Iced Coffee, an Istanbul Cardamom-Date Mocha, a Turkish Coffee Tahini Protein Shake and an Ethiopian Spiced Coffee-Banana Protein Shake. You can also find every coffee recipe in the recipe finder, or read about the world's healthy cuisines the book draws on.
Questions people ask
Who discovered coffee?
No one knows. The plant is native to Ethiopia, and the first reliable evidence of coffee as a drink comes from Sufi communities in Yemen in the 15th century. Kaldi the goatherd belongs to legend.
Is the story of Kaldi true?
There is no evidence for it. The earliest known written version was published in 1671, long after coffee drinking began, and the details change from one telling to the next. It is best enjoyed as a story.
Where does the word "coffee" come from?
From the Arabic qahwa, by way of the Turkish kahve and then European languages such as Italian (caffè) and Dutch (koffie). Some scholars think qahwa was once a word for wine. A link to Kaffa, a region of Ethiopia, is often suggested, though many linguists find it less likely.
When did coffee reach Europe?
In the early 1600s, through Venetian trade with the Ottoman world. Coffee houses soon followed: in Venice, then in Oxford around 1650 and London in 1652, and before long in Paris and Vienna.