The History of Coffee

Origins of a Culture

The word “coffee” entered English in 1598 via Dutch koffie.

This word was created via Turkish kahve, the Turkish pronunciation Arabic qahwa, a truncation of qahhwat al-bun or wine of the bean.

One possible origin of the name is the Kingdom of Kaffa in Ethiopia, where the coffee plant originated; its name there is bunn or bunna.

Legendary Brew

There are several legendary accounts of the origin of the drink itself. One account involves the Yemenite Sufi mystic Shaikh ash-Shadhili.

When traveling in Ethiopia, the legend goes, he observed goats of unusual vitality, and, upon trying the berries that the goats had been eating, experienced the same vitality.

It is supposed that the Ethiopians, the ancestors of today’s Oromo tribe, were the first to have recognized the energizing effect of the native coffee plant.

The Origin of Tradition

The earliest credible evidence of either coffee drinking or knowledge of the coffee tree appears in the middle of the fifteenth century, in the Sufi monasteries of the Yemen in southern Arabia.

It was in Yemen that coffee beans were first roasted and brewed as they are today. From Mocha, coffee spread to Egypt and North Africa, and by the 15th century, it had reached the rest of the Middle East, Persia and Turkey.

From the Muslim world, coffee drinking spread to Italy, then to the rest of Europe, and coffee plants were transported by the Dutch to the East Indies and to the Americas.

Last Stop: Down Under

Australia is a minor coffee producer, with little product for export, but its coffee history goes back to 1880 when the first of 500acres (2.0km2) began to be developed in an area between northern New South Wales and Cooktown.

Today there are several producers of Arabica coffee in Australia that use a mechanical harvesting system invented in 1981.