Wild Coffea arabica evolved in Ethiopia, but a 2020 genetic study found that nearly all cultivated arabica worldwide descends from a narrow group of plants first farmed in Yemen. The word coffee runs through Ottoman Turkish kahve to Arabic qahwa, a term medieval lexicographers linked to wine. The goatherd Kaldi story first appeared in print only in 1671, and the credible record begins with 15th century Sufis in Yemen using coffee for night prayers. Coffeehouses spread to Mecca, Cairo, and Istanbul, drawing bans in Mecca in 1511 and Cairo in 1532, until Suleiman the Magnificent and his Grand Mufti declared the drink permissible.

Europe got coffee through Venetian merchants, and when priests called it the devil’s drink, Pope Clement VIII tasted it around 1600 and gave it his blessing. Then came the smuggling. Pieter van den Broecke carried live bushes from Mocha to Amsterdam in 1616, leading to Dutch plantations in Ceylon and Java. Gabriel de Clieu nursed a seedling to Martinique in 1720, and in 1727 Francisco de Melo Palheta left French Guiana with seeds hidden in a bouquet from the governor’s wife. The expansion ran on enslaved labor in Saint-Domingue and Brazil.

• The first mainland European coffeehouse opened in Venice in 1645, and England had more than 3,000 by 1675.
• The 1674 Women’s Petition Against Coffee claimed the drink left English husbands impotent.
• By 1788 Saint-Domingue, modern Haiti, supplied half the world’s coffee.
• Brazil became the largest producer by 1852 and relied on enslaved labor until abolition in 1888.
• Naples’ caffè sospeso lets a customer prepay a coffee for the next stranger in need.