The dancing-goat story of coffee's discovery surfaced only in 1671
The popular tale of Kaldi, a goatherd who noticed his flock buzzing after nibbling coffee, does not appear in writing before 1671 and is probably invented. The firmer evidence is less charming but more surprising: nobody can confirm coffee as a drink before the 15th century, among Sufis in Yemen.
Tenth- and eleventh-century physicians al-Razi and Avicenna described something called bunchum, sometimes read as coffee, but later accounts say it came from a root. What is clear is that by the mid-1400s Sufi circles in Yemen, around Aden, Mocha and Zabid, were roasting and brewing the seeds to stay awake through night-time devotions. The plant probably arrived across the Red Sea from Ethiopia, where wild coffee seems to have been gathered, possibly from the 14th century.
The name followed the trade. English picked up coffee in 1582 from Dutch koffie, which came via Ottoman Turkish kahve from Arabic qahwah, a word probably meaning the dark one; some link it instead to Ethiopia's Kaffa region. In Arabic the bean itself is bunn. A German physician, Leonhard Rauwolf, described in 1583 an ink-black drink passed around in a porcelain cup, prized for stomach complaints.
Istanbul had a coffeehouse in its Tahtakale district by 1555. Europe hesitated over a Muslim drink until Pope Clement VIII blessed it as Christian in 1600, and Venice opened a coffeehouse in 1647. The diarist John Evelyn tasted it at Oxford in 1637, brought by a Cretan student, and the city's Queen's Lane Coffee House, founded in 1654, still trades. Austria and Poland took to it after coffee was seized from the retreating Ottoman army at Vienna in 1683. Until the end of the 17th century Yemen supplied most of the world's beans.
Then cultivation spread, often brutally. The Dutch grew coffee in Java, and a Frenchman, Gabriel de Clieu, carried a plant to Martinique in the 1720s, ancestor of much of today's arabica. Saint-Domingue, now Haiti, was producing half the world's coffee by 1788, and conditions for its enslaved workers fed the Haitian Revolution. Brazil became the top producer by 1852 and still grew 31 percent of the world total in 2023, in an industry valued at about 495 billion dollars.
Source: Coffee
