Drinks
Coffee
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A brewed infusion of roasted, ground coffee beans, the seeds of the Coffea plant native to the Ethiopian highlands. A popular legend credits an Ethiopian goatherd named Kaldi with discovering coffee's stimulant effect after his goats ate the berries; this is folklore rather than an attested historical event. The earliest solid documentary and archaeological evidence for coffee drinking and cultivation as a prepared beverage comes from Sufi monasteries and coffeehouses in 15th-century Yemen, from where it spread through the Ottoman world and into Europe over the following two centuries.
Facts
Origin Period, From (Year) Origin RegionEthiopian highlands (the historic Kaffa region), with early cultivation and brewing as a beverage documented in 15th-century Yemen 2 Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
A specific unfiltered brewing method for the same Coffea plant Coffee covers generically.
Expresses Tradition
Sources
Open Questions (1 open question)
How far does coffee drinking or cultivation in Ethiopia predate the earliest 15th-century documented evidence from Yemen?
The popular account of coffee origin, a goatherd named Kaldi noticing his goats grow lively after eating coffee berries, was first put into writing in 1671 by Antoine Faustus Nairon, nearly a thousand years after Kaldi supposedly lived, and no earlier written trace of the story exists; it is folklore, not history. The earliest solid documentary and archaeological evidence for coffee drinking and cultivation as a prepared beverage instead comes from Sufi monasteries and coffeehouses in 15th-century Yemen. Coffea itself is native to the Ethiopian highlands, and Ethiopian oral tradition and later regional use are widely assumed to predate the Yemeni record, but no dated textual or archaeobotanical evidence currently closes the gap between the plant's native range and the first solid 15th-century documentation of it being deliberately cultivated and brewed.
What would resolve this A dated archaeobotanical find of coffee cultivation or preparation in Ethiopia, or a textual reference to coffee drinking there, that predates the 15th-century Yemeni monastery and coffeehouse record.
Archaeobotany and Ethiopian textual historyHistory of Coffee (Encyclopaedia Britannica)
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