A Short History of Coffee: From Ethiopian Legend to Your Morning Cup

Every cup of coffee we roast and deliver – to a café in Bishop's Stortford, an office in the City or a kitchen down the road – is the latest chapter in a story that is well over a thousand years old. It's a story of goatherds and monks, of coffeehouses that rulers tried and failed to close, of trade, of empire and, more recently, of a far better understanding of where good coffee comes from.

Here is our short history of coffee, in seven moments.

1. Ethiopia, c. 850: it starts with some lively goats

Coffee's most famous origin story concerns Kaldi, a goatherd in the highlands of what is now Ethiopia. As the tale goes, he noticed his goats leaping about with unusual energy after nibbling the red cherries of a shrub. He tried them himself, felt the effect, and took the cherries to a local monastery, where the monks found that a drink made from them kept them alert through long evening prayers.

It's a lovely story, but it is a legend. It wasn't written down until 1671, in a Latin text by the scholar Antoine Faustus Nairon, centuries after it was supposed to have happened. What is certain is that Coffea arabica grows wild in the forests of south-west Ethiopia, and that people there were using the plant long before coffee as we know it reached anywhere else. Ethiopia remains one of the world's great coffee origins, and its beans are still prized for their bright, fruity and floral character.

2. Yemen, 1400s: brewed to stay awake for prayer

The first reliable evidence of coffee drinking comes from Yemen in the fifteenth century. Sufi communities there brewed a drink from roasted coffee beans to help them stay awake and focused during night-time devotions.

Yemeni farmers began cultivating coffee on terraced mountainsides, and the Red Sea port of Mocha became the centre of the world's coffee trade. For around two hundred years, almost all the coffee drunk anywhere came through Yemen. The name lives on: "mocha" still turns up on café menus everywhere, even if today it usually means something with chocolate in it.

3. Mecca, Cairo and Istanbul, 1500s: the first coffeehouses

From Yemen, coffee spread quickly through the Islamic world. By the early sixteenth century it was being drunk in Mecca and Cairo, and by the 1550s the first coffeehouses had opened in Istanbul.

These qahveh khaneh were something new: public places where people met to talk, play chess and backgammon, listen to music and storytellers, and exchange news. They were sometimes called "schools of the wise". Not everyone approved. Religious and political authorities in Mecca, Cairo and Istanbul tried to ban coffee or close the coffeehouses on several occasions, worried about what people were saying to each other over their cups. The bans never lasted.

4. Europe and England, 1600s: the penny universities

Venetian merchants were among the first to bring coffee to Europe, and Venice had coffeehouses by the 1640s. England was not far behind. The country's first coffeehouse opened in Oxford in 1650, and in 1652 Pasqua Rosée, a Greek servant of a London merchant, opened London's first in St Michael's Alley, Cornhill.

The idea caught on fast. Within a few decades London had hundreds of coffeehouses, and they became known as "penny universities": for the price of a penny, you could buy a dish of coffee and join conversations about politics, science, trade and the latest news. Some of Britain's most famous institutions began this way. Lloyd's of London, the insurance market, grew out of Edward Lloyd's coffee house on Tower Street, where ship owners and merchants met in the late 1680s. The London Stock Exchange also traces its roots to the brokers who gathered at Jonathan's Coffee-House.

Charles II tried to suppress coffeehouses in 1675, fearing they were hotbeds of political dissent. The proclamation was withdrawn within days.

5. The Americas and Java, 1700s: a global crop with a harder history

As demand in Europe grew, colonial powers wanted to grow coffee themselves rather than buy it through Yemen. The Dutch established coffee plantations on Java in what is now Indonesia at the end of the seventeenth century. The French took coffee to the Caribbean in the 1720s, and coffee reached Brazil in 1727, which would go on to become – and remains – the world's largest producer.

This is the part of coffee's history that is easy to skip, but shouldn't be. Much of that expansion was built on colonial land seizure and the labour of enslaved people, particularly in the Caribbean and Brazil. Coffee became cheap and widely available in Europe partly because of that injustice.

It's one of the reasons we think it matters to know where coffee comes from and how it is grown today. Responsible sourcing, fair prices for farmers and traceable supply chains are not just marketing terms – they're a response to a long history. You can read more about our approach in our guide to ethical and sustainable sourcing.

6. The 1900s: espresso, instant and the coffee shop

The twentieth century changed how coffee was made and drunk. Italian inventors developed espresso machines that forced hot water through finely ground coffee under pressure, and Achille Gaggia's lever machine, patented in the late 1940s, created the crema we now expect on a good espresso. Instant coffee became a household staple in Britain after the Second World War, and later in the century the coffee shop, and the cappuccinos and lattes that came with it, became part of everyday life on the high street.

More recently the "speciality coffee" movement has brought the focus back to the beans themselves: their origin, variety, processing and roast. If you've ever wondered how that differs from everyday commercial coffee, we've explained it in speciality vs commercial coffee.

7. Today: from green bean to your cup

Coffee is now grown in more than 70 countries across the "bean belt" between the tropics, and an estimated two billion cups are drunk around the world every day. Here in the UK, the British Coffee Association estimates that we get through around 98 million cups a day.

At Hessian Coffee, our part in that story happens in Hertfordshire. Our coffee arrives as green beans, which we deliver to cafés, restaurants, hotels, pubs, offices and homes across the region. We also supply and look after traditional & bean-to-cup machines many of our customers use to brew it, so the coffee is as good in the cup as it was in the roaster.

The goatherd, the Sufi monks and the penny universities would probably recognise what happens next: people stopping, talking and sharing a cup.

Find your next chapter

Whether you run a café, manage an office or simply want better coffee at home, we'd love to help. Browse our coffee beans, take a look at our bean-to-cup machines, or get in touch with the team to talk about beans, machines or wholesale supply.