Coffee is a beverage brewed from roasted, ground coffee beans. Dark-colored and bitter, coffee has a stimulating effect on humans due to its caffeine content; however decaffeinated coffee is also commercially available. There are also various coffee substitutes.
Coffee production begins when the seeds from coffee cherries, the Coffea plant's fruits, are separated to produce unroasted green coffee beans. The "beans" are roasted and then ground into fine particles. Coffee is brewed from the ground roasted beans, which are typically steeped in hot water before being filtered out. It is usually served hot, although chilled or iced coffee is common. Coffee can be prepared and presented in a variety of ways, e.g., espresso, French press, caffè latte, or already-brewed canned coffee. Sugar, sugar substitutes, milk, and cream are often added and change the flavor.
Though coffee has become a global commodity, it has a history tied to food traditions around the Red Sea. The earliest reports of coffee drinking pertain to the plant's use among the Sufis of Yemen in southern Arabia in the middle of the 15th century. Up to the end of the 17th century, most of the world's coffee was imported from Yemen. As it gained in popularity, coffee started to be cultivated in Java in the 17th century and the Americas from the 18th century.
The two most commonly grown coffee bean types are C. arabica and C. robusta. Coffee plants are cultivated in over 70 countries, primarily in the equatorial regions of the Americas, Southeast Asia, the Indian subcontinent, and Africa. Green, unroasted coffee is traded as an agricultural commodity. The global coffee industry was worth US$495.50 billion in 2023. In 2023, Brazil was the leading grower of coffee beans, producing 31% of the world's total, followed by Vietnam. While coffee sales reach billions of dollars annually worldwide, coffee farmers disproportionately live in poverty. Critics of the coffee industry have pointed to its negative impact on the environment, including clearing of land for coffee growing and water use.
Etymology
The word coffee entered the English language in 1582 via the Dutch , borrowed from the Ottoman Turkish (), borrowed from the Arabic (). Medieval Arabic lexicons traditionally held that the etymology of meant 'wine', given its distinctly dark color, and was derived from the verb (), 'to have no appetite'. The word most likely meant 'the dark one', referring to the brew or the bean.
is not the name of the bean, which are known in Arabic as and in Cushitic languages as . Semitic languages have the root , 'dark color', which became a natural designation for the beverage. Its cognates include the Hebrew 'dulling' and the Aramaic qahey ('give acrid taste to'). Although etymologists have connected it with a word meaning , it is also thought to be from the Kaffa region of Ethiopia.
The terms coffee pot and coffee break originated in 1705 and 1952, respectively.
History
Legendary accounts and myths There are multiple anecdotal origin stories which lack evidence. Ralph S. Hattox records traditions in which the Islamic prophet Muhammad is said to have been introduced to a stimulating beverage by the Angel Gabriel, who recommended it for its restorative qualities. In another commonly repeated legend, Kaldi, a 9th-century Ethiopian or Arab goatherd, first observed the coffee plant after seeing his flock energized by chewing on the plant. This legend does not appear before 1671, indicating the story is likely apocryphal, first being related by Antoine Faustus Nairon, a Maronite professor of Oriental languages and author of one of the first printed treatises devoted to coffee, (Rome, 1671), which describes a camel or goat herder in the Kingdom of Ayaman, Arabia Felix.Noted by H. F. Nicolai, Der Kaffee und seine Ersatzmittel: Volkshygienische Studie, (Brunswick, 1901) ch. 1 "Geschichtliches über den Kaffee" p. 4 note 1. The herder is unnamed in the earliest account and the name Kaldi appears to be a later invention from the twentieth century. Another legend attributes the discovery of coffee to a Sheikh Omar. Starving after being exiled from Mokha, Omar found berries. After attempting to chew and roast them, Omar boiled them, which yielded a liquid that revitalized and sustained him.
Historical transmission
The earliest possible references to the coffee bean and its qualities appear in al-Razi's 10th-century al-Hawi and in Avicenna's 11th-century The Canon of Medicine both which describe a plant component called bunchum as hot and dry—with al-Razi reporting beneficial effects for the stomach and Ibn Sina also adding claims for the skin and body odor. According to later accounts, bunchum was made from a root rather than from coffee beans.Dufour, Traitez nouveaux et curieux du café, du thé et du chocolat (Lyon, 1684, etc.). There is no confirmed evidence, either historical or archaeological, of coffee as a drink being consumed before the 15th century. The drink appears to be a relatively recent development. By the late 15th century, coffee drinking was well established among Sufi communities in Yemen.
An early writer on coffee was Abd al-Qadir al-Jaziri of Ottoman Iraq, who in 1587 compiled a work tracing the history and legal controversies of coffee in his ʿUmdat al-ṣafwa fī ḥill al-qahwa (), in which he claims that the coffee bean originated in the "land of Sa'ad ad-Din, and the country of Abyssinia, and of the Jabart, and other places of the land of ‘Ajam, but the time of its first use is unknown, nor do we know the reason." Al-Jazīrī asserts that coffee was introduced to Cairo at the start of the 16th century by Sufi devotees.
Coffee appears to have been likely collected from wild, with some indications that its use expanded from the 14th century among certain Islamized groups in southeastern Ethiopia, though direct evidence for early consumption remains scarce. The use of coffee is believed to have spread across the Red Sea to the Rasulid sultanate of Yemen, who maintained cultural and commercial ties with the Adal Sultanate. Its consumption first appears in Yemen, particularly in regions such as Aden, Mocha and Zabid during the 15th century. The 16th-century scholar Ibn Hajar al-Haytami writes about the plant's development from a tree in the Zeila region. In 1542, a Portuguese crew met with a ship from Zeila transporting clarified butter and coffee to Al-Shihr in Yemen.
Other sources of coffee drinking or knowledge of the coffee tree appear in the middle of the 15th century in the accounts of Ahmed al-Ghaffar in Yemen, where coffee seeds were first roasted and brewed in a similar way to how it is prepared now. Coffee was used by Sufi circles to stay awake for their religious rituals. Accounts differ on the origin of the coffee plant before its appearance in Yemen. Coffee may have been introduced to Yemen from Ethiopia via the Red Sea trade. One account credits Muhammad Ibn Sa'd al-Dhabḥani for bringing coffee to Aden from the Somali coast, other early accounts say Ali ben Omar of the Shadhili Sufi order was the first to introduce coffee to Arabia. By the 16th century, coffee had reached the rest of the Middle East and North Africa.
In 1583, Leonhard Rauwolf, a German physician, gave this description of coffee after returning from a ten-year trip to the Near East:
Within the Ottoman Empire, the first coffeehouse opened in 1555 in Tahtakale, Istanbul. Since Tahtakale is to the West of the Bosporus, this would likely have been the first coffee house in Europe. Thriving trade brought many goods, including coffee, from the Ottoman Empire to Venice. Coffee became more widely accepted in Europe after Pope Clement VIII declared it a Christian beverage in 1600, despite appeals to ban the "Muslim drink". Coffee had spread to Italy by 1600 and then to the rest of Europe, Indonesia, and the Americas. The first European coffeehouse outside of the Ottoman Empire opened in Venice in 1647.
As a colonial import
The Dutch East India Company was the first to import coffee on a large scale. The Dutch later grew the crop in Java and Ceylon. The first exports of Indonesian coffee from Java to the Netherlands occurred in 1711.
Through the efforts of the British East India Company, coffee became popular in England. In a diary entry of May 1637, John Evelyn records tasting the drink at Oxford, where it had been brought by a student of Balliol College from Crete named Nathaniel Conopios of Crete.Diary of John Evelyn (various editions) Oxford's Queen's Lane Coffee House, established in 1654, is still in existence today. Coffee was introduced in France in 1657 and in Austria and Poland after the 1683 Battle of Vienna, when coffee was captured from supplies of the defeated Turks.
When coffee reached North America during the Colonial period, it was initially not as successful as in Europe, as alcoholic beverages remained more popular. During the Revolutionary War, the demand for coffee increased so much that dealers had to hoard their scarce supplies and raise prices dramatically; this was also due to the reduced availability of tea from British merchants, and a general resolution among many Americans to avoid drinking tea following the 1773 Boston Tea Party.(1) (2) At Google Books. Note: Fredricka Charlotte Riedesel was the wife of General Friedrich Adolf Riedesel, commander of all German and Indian troops in General John Burgoyne's Saratoga campaign and American prisoner of war during the American Revolution.(3) At Google Books.(4) (5) (6)
During the 18th century, coffee consumption declined in Britain, giving way to tea drinking. Tea was simpler to make and had become cheaper with the British conquest of India and the tea industry there. During the Age of Sail, seamen aboard ships of the British Royal Navy made substitute coffee by dissolving burnt bread in hot water. According to Captain Haines, who was the colonial administrator of Aden (1839–1854), Mokha historically imported up to two-thirds of its coffee from Berbera-based merchants before the coffee trade of Mokha was captured by British-controlled Aden in the 19th century. After that, much of the Ethiopian coffee was exported to Aden via Berbera.
Frenchman Gabriel de Clieu took a coffee plant to the French territory of Martinique in the Caribbean in the 1720s, from which much of the world's cultivated arabica coffee is descended. Coffee thrived in the climate and was conveyed across the Americas. Coffee was cultivated in Saint-Domingue, now Haiti, from 1734, and by 1788 it supplied half the world's coffee. The conditions that the enslaved people worked in on coffee plantations were a factor in the Haitian Revolution, and the coffee industry never fully recovered there.
Mass production
In the late 16th century, Yemen developed a booming coffee economy. Farmers grew coffee on mountain terraces above the Tihamah plain, and trade routes linked its ports to Jeddah and Cairo. By the 17th century, coffee had surpassed the global spice trade. Up to the end of the 17th century, Yemen was the world's main producer for coffee, and Mocha was the world's largest shipping port for coffee.
Coffee was introduced to Brazil in 1727, but its cultivation did not gather momentum until independence in 1822. After this time, massive tracts of rainforest were cleared for coffee plantations, first around Rio de Janeiro and later São Paulo. Brazil went from having essentially no coffee exports in 1800 to being a significant regional producer in 1830, to being the largest producer in the world by 1852. Between 1910 and 1920, Brazil exported around 70% of the world's coffee; Colombia, Guatemala, and Venezuela exported 15%; and Old World production accounted for less than 5% of world exports.