A short timeline
History of coffee
The route from a wild East African plant to a drink shared almost everywhere. Not every origin story is certain, but this is the path historians can trace.
- 01
Before the cup
Ethiopian highlands
Arabica begins here
Coffea arabica evolved in the forests of southwestern Ethiopia. People in the region used parts of the plant long before there was a drink we would recognise as coffee.
- 02
15th century
Yemen
Coffee becomes a crop and a ritual
Seeds crossed the Red Sea to Yemen, where coffee was cultivated commercially. Sufi communities used coffee to stay awake for night devotions, and the drink began to travel beyond its original home.
- 03
1500s
Mecca, Cairo and Istanbul
The coffeehouse arrives
Coffee moved through the Arabian Peninsula, the Red Sea and the Ottoman world. Coffeehouses became places to talk, listen, play games, conduct business and argue about ideas.
- 04
1600s
Europe
A new social drink
Merchants carried coffee into European port cities. London, Venice, Paris and Vienna developed their own coffeehouse cultures, each with a different relationship to work, news and conversation.
- 05
17th–19th centuries
The coffee belt
Coffee goes global
European trade and colonial cultivation spread coffee across the tropics, including the Caribbean, Central and South America, Africa and Asia. It also bound coffee to unequal systems of land and labour that shaped the industry for generations.
- 06
17th century onward
India
Coffee finds the Western Ghats
A popular account credits Baba Budan with bringing coffee seeds from Yemen to Karnataka. What is certain is that coffee took root in the Western Ghats, where it remains one of India’s defining growing regions.
- 07
1901–1940s
Italy and beyond
Pressure changes the cup
Early espresso machines turned coffee into a faster, more concentrated drink. Over the following decades, cafés refined the shot, the machine and the milk drinks that now fill much of the modern menu.
- 08
Today
Everywhere coffee grows
Back to origin
Specialty coffee asks more of the cup: who grew it, where it came from, how it was processed and roasted, and whether the people behind it are paid fairly. The answer is still unfinished.
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