Where does Coffee (the drink) come from?
Coffee as a drink comes from Yemen. The coffee plant grows wild in Ethiopia's forests, but it was in Yemen, in the 1400s, that people began roasting and brewing its beans and growing it as a crop, and for two centuries the world's coffee came from there.
Roasted and brewed in Yemen
There is no confirmed evidence of coffee being drunk before the 15th century. By the late 1400s it was well established in Yemen, among Sufi communities who drank it to stay alert through long nights. In 1587 the writer al-Jaziri credited Jamal al-Din al-Dhabhani of Aden, who died in 1470, with being the first to take it up, around 1454. Yemen was also where Coffea arabica was first grown as a crop on a large scale, on terraced slopes in the western highlands.
Mocha, the only gateway
From Yemen, coffee spread to Mecca and, in the early 1500s, to Cairo, then on to Damascus and Istanbul, where the first coffeehouse opened in 1554. Caravans carried the beans to the Red Sea ports, above all Mocha, and until the end of the 17th century Mocha was the world's only gateway for coffee. Europeans bought there too: in 1616 the Dutch merchant Pieter van den Broecke took coffee bushes from Mocha to Amsterdam, and the Dutch later grew coffee in Ceylon and Java.
Why people say Ethiopia or Brazil
Both guesses are close. Ethiopia is the plant's home: wild Coffea arabica grows in its natural forests. Brazil is today's giant. In 1727 Francisco de Melo Palheta smuggled seeds into Brazil from French Guiana, and by 1852 Brazil was the world's largest coffee producer, which it still is. But the drink, and the crop, began in Yemen: almost all cultivated arabica today descends from plants farmed there.
Sources: en.wikipedia.org ↗ · pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov ↗
