Sufi Monks Drank Coffee to Stay Awake in 15th-Century Yemen

Coffee is one of those products whose origin myth — an Ethiopian goatherd called Kaldi noticing his goats getting jumpy after eating red berries — almost certainly never happened, but whose actual cultural origin is interesting in its own right. The coffee plant, Coffea arabica, is native to the highlands of southwestern Ethiopia, the Boma Plateau in Sudan, and Mount Marsabit in northern Kenya. Coffee as a brewed drink, however, took shape in Yemen.

In the second half of the fifteenth century, Sufi communities along the Red Sea coast of Yemen were using coffee as a religious aid. The drink kept members alert for dhikr, the long nighttime litanies of repeated divine names that are the centerpiece of certain Sufi orders. The ritual use traveled with the orders. Coffee reached Mecca and Cairo within decades and was being consumed openly in mosques. This was controversial enough that the governor of Mecca attempted, in 1511, to ban it on the grounds that it was an intoxicant. The ban did not stick.

From Mecca and Cairo coffee spread through the Ottoman Empire and, with merchants, to Europe. The Ottoman capital Istanbul had its first commercial coffeehouse around 1555. The first European coffeehouse outside Ottoman territory opened in Venice in 1647, followed by London (1652), Oxford (1654), Paris (1672), and Vienna (1683). The drink crossed the Atlantic with European colonists; coffee was first planted in Brazil in 1727 by an officer who reportedly seduced a French governor's wife in French Guiana to obtain seedlings. By the 1910s, Brazil supplied about 70% of the world's coffee. Today the global coffee industry runs around half a trillion U.S. dollars in annual revenue.