History of Coffee

The history of coffee goes at least as far back as the thirteenth century. The story of Kaldi, the 9th-century Ethiopian goat herder who discovered coffee while searching for his goats, did not appear in writing until 1671 and is probably apocryphal. From Ethiopia, coffee was said to have spread to Egypt and Yemen. The earliest credible evidence of either coffee drinking or knowledge of the coffee tree appears in the middle of the fifteenth century, in the Sufi monasteries of Yemen. By the 16th century, it had reached the rest of the Middle East, Persia, Turkey, and northern Africa. Coffee then spread to Balkans, Italy, and to the rest of Europe, to Indonesia, and then to America.