Coffee history offers an enticing blend of legends, lore, and facts, all of which aim to explain humankind’s evolving relationship down through the centuries with the seeds of the various species of tree scientifically known as Coffea.

No one knows precisely how humans first became aware of coffee’s uplifting properties. One ancient legend from Abyssinia in northeastern Africa, where coffee may have originated, tells of the goatherd Kaldi, who noticed one day how lively his flock became after nibbling the bright red berries of a wild, shrublike trees with white blossoms smelling of jasmine. Kaldi tried them, too, and felt wondrously restored. When he brought a handful to a holy man and told him of their properties, the sage declared them evil and cast them into the fire, from which a rich, enticing aroma soon rose. The two men quickly retrieved the roasted beans, ground them, steeped them in water, and soon were sipping the world’s first cup of coffee.

The First Coffeehouses
Less romanticized tales of coffee history recount how the members of various northeastern African tribes combined ground coffee beans with animal fat and rolled the mixture into balls for battle rations, or fermented the juicy fruit surrounding the beans to make wine, or enjoyed a sustaining porridge made from the beans. By the 11th century AD, Arab traders had carried coffee to the Middle East, where it was first commercially cultivated. Over the next 500 years, kahwah, as it was called, became widespread throughout the Arab world, and around it grew the first coffeehouses, where those who loved the drink would gather to chat, debate, play games such as chess, read, or conduct business.

European Coffee Drinking
In the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries, coffee drinking spread across Europe. It won favor with Pope Clement VIII, who officially baptized the Arab drink to make it a Christian beverage. Coffeehouse culture took root in such nations as Italy, France, Austria, Prussia, and across Scandinavia.

In England, such eminent writers as Alexander Pope, Daniel Defoe, and Henry Fielding gravitated towards the flurry of ideas and gossip to be found in coffeehouses, and no less an institution than the great insurance company, Lloyd’s of London, began business over cups of the steaming brew. Meanwhile, French and Portuguese explorers brought both coffee drinking and cultivation to the Caribbean and Latin America.

American Coffee History
Coffee was enjoyed in Britain’s 13 North American colonies, too. In Boston’s Green Dragon coffeehouse, Paul Revere and John Adams plotted the Boston Tea Party. By dumping British shipments of tea into the harbor, they not only helped to spark the American Revolution but also elevated coffee to the status of patriotic drink. Coffee was a mainstay of life in the growing nation, offering solace to its troops in the Mexican-American and Civil wars, and becoming the campfire drink of choice for the cowboys who developed and settled the American West.

The world’s love affair with coffee goes on. From the Beatnik hangouts of the 1950s to the booming European-style coffeehouses and espresso bars popularized by such companies as Starbucks and Peet’s since the early 1990s, our relationship with coffee continues to grow stronger and deeper, like the beverage itself.