Coffee: A Short History

Every day, people around the world drink more than two billion cups of coffee. But this everyday drink has a long and fascinating history — one in which the Arab world played a central role.

According to a popular legend, coffee was discovered in Ethiopia by a goat herder named Kaldi, who noticed that his goats became unusually energetic after eating red berries from a certain bush. Whether or not the story is true, historians agree that the coffee plant originally grew wild in the Ethiopian highlands.

The first reliable evidence of coffee drinking comes from Yemen in the fifteenth century. Sufi scholars drank it to stay awake during long nights of prayer. From the port of Mocha — which later gave its name to a type of coffee — the beans were exported across the Arabian Peninsula and beyond. The English word "coffee" itself comes, via Turkish and Italian, from the Arabic qahwa.

By the sixteenth century, coffee houses had appeared in Mecca, Cairo and Istanbul. They quickly became important social spaces where people met to talk, listen to music, play chess and discuss the news. Some rulers were suspicious of these gatherings and even tried to ban them, but coffee proved too popular to stop.

In the seventeenth century, coffee reached Europe, where coffee houses in cities such as London and Vienna became centres of business and intellectual debate.

Today, coffee is grown in more than 70 countries, with Brazil the largest producer. Yet in the Gulf, the traditional way of serving it remains an important symbol of hospitality. Light, cardamom-flavoured Arabic coffee is poured into small cups and served with dates, and Saudi Arabia has even named 2022 the "Year of Saudi Coffee". In 2015, UNESCO recognised Arabic coffee as part of humanity's intangible cultural heritage.