Where Did Coffee Originate? The Plant, the Drink and the Legend of Kaldi

Coffee the plant and coffee the drink have two different birthplaces. Wild Arabica is native to the forested highlands of southwestern Ethiopia, while the brewed drink first appears in the written record among Sufi communities in Yemen in the mid-15th century.

Ask where coffee originated and you will hear of Ethiopia, Yemen and a goatherd named Kaldi. Two of those answers are history; the third is a story with a history of its own.

Where did coffee originate? The wild forests of Ethiopia

Kafa, the cradle of Arabica

Coffea arabica still grows wild in Ethiopia. A 2012 study in PLOS ONE by Davis, Gole, Baena and Moat is direct: "The largest and most diverse populations of indigenous (wild) Arabica occur in the highlands of south-western Ethiopia". A 2010 Tropentag conference paper by Hindorf, Denich and Gole agrees that the species comes from southwestern Ethiopia, where it still grows wild.

Wild coffee grows in the forests of Kafa (also spelled Kaffa). UNESCO, which designated the area as the Kafa Biosphere Reserve in 2010, says Kafa "is the centre of origin and genetic diversity of wild Coffea arabica." Here coffee is an understory shrub, not a crop in rows. Davis and his co-authors found wild Arabica confined almost entirely to one habitat, the Moist Evergreen Afromontane Forest.

A range wider than one country

Ethiopia is the main center, but not the only one. Davis et al. record a satellite population on the Boma Plateau in southeastern South Sudan, and they judge that the coffee on Mount Marsabit in Kenya probably lies outside Arabica's natural range. Whether Yemen belongs on the map of wild Arabica is disputed: Wikipedia's article on the species lists it, the Davis study does not.

Altitude and diversity

Wild Arabica grows at roughly 1,000 to 2,000 m (about 3,300 to 6,600 ft), but the sources differ on the edges. Davis et al. give 950 to 1,950 m (about 3,100 to 6,400 ft); the Tropentag paper gives 1,000 to 2,100 m (about 3,300 to 6,900 ft).

Both stress the genetic wealth of these forests. Davis and colleagues write that wild Arabica is far more diverse genetically than the cultivated varieties grown on farms, and the Tropentag authors describe the forests as a unique gene pool for coffee breeding, in Ethiopia and beyond. Published counts of Ethiopian varieties conflict, and none has been verified.

The legend of Kaldi and the dancing goats

The story as it is usually told

A goatherd in the Ethiopian highlands notices that his goats turn lively after eating red berries from a certain shrub. He takes the berries to a monastery. In the National Coffee Association's version, the abbot makes a drink from them and finds that it keeps him alert. In the telling of Cog Coffee, a specialty roaster, monks condemn the berries as demonic and throw them into a fire, then rake them out when the smell of the roasting beans proves too good to resist. Some popular retellings date the story to around 850 CE, with no documentary basis.

Where the legend really comes from

The story is far younger than it claims to be. It first appears in writing in 1671, in a Latin treatise, De saluberrima potione cahue, seu cafe nuncupata discursus, by Antoine Faustus Nairon, a Maronite priest of Lebanese origin who taught Oriental languages in Rome. As the linguist George van Driem writes in The Tale of Tea (2019), quoted on Wikipedia, "there is no mention of any goatherd named 'Kaldi' in any historical source on coffee."

According to Solène Tadié, in the National Catholic Register, the herder of the oldest version has no name and the scene is Yemen, not Ethiopia: he complains to monks "in the kingdom of Ayaman, Arabia Felix — which corresponds to present-day Yemen." The name Kaldi, she adds, was attached later and is missing from that first written telling. Wikipedia places the addition in the 20th century. Not every writer agrees: Ed Simon, in The Millions (2022), credits Nairon himself with a named Kaldi in Ethiopia, though he cites no source.

Variants abound. Ukers reports the view of the French orientalist Antoine Galland that the monks of the story were really dervishes, that is, Sufis. That is how legends behave. Kaldi is a fine story to tell over a cup. It is not evidence.

Who invented coffee?

Nobody invented coffee: the plant is a wild species, and the drink took shape gradually. The first people we can document drinking it are Sufis in Yemen in the mid-15th century, who used it to stay awake for their night devotions. As Wikipedia's article on coffee puts it, "There is no confirmed evidence, either historical or archaeological, of coffee as a drink being consumed before the 15th century." Before that century was out, the drink had become a fixture of Sufi life in Yemen.

Al-Dhabhani, the earliest named figure

The first individual history attaches to coffee is Jamal al-Din al-Dhabhani, mufti of Aden. Wikipedia, citing the chronicler al-Jaziri (1587), names him as the first to adopt coffee, around 1454, and Ukers gives the same date. The account has caveats. Ralph S. Hattox, author of Coffee and Coffeehouses (1985), concedes that it is partly legend, as Cecil Adams reports in The Straight Dope. Ukers thought it quite likely that Aden knew the drink before Sheik Gemaleddin (his spelling of al-Dhabhani).

A later Arabic account (al-Makki), cited by Zaimeche, adds that al-Dhabhani turned to coffee during a shortage of khat (qat), the leaf his followers had used before. It is a single-source claim, so treat it as unconfirmed.

Sheikh Omar and the disputed physicians

A second legend, related by Ukers, credits Sheikh Omar, a disciple of the 13th-century Sufi mystic Abu al-Hasan al-Shadhili, with discovering coffee.

Some also claim that Rhazes (al-Razi, 10th century) and Ibn Sina (Avicenna, around 1000) described coffee under the name bunchum. This is contested. Zaimeche accepts it; Ukers quotes scholars who doubt it, one of whom came to think that bunchum may have been a root rather than coffee. Neither man can safely be called coffee's discoverer.

Some authorities, Ukers notes, pushed coffee drinking back to the sixth century, and Chris Kornman of Royal Coffee raises the possibility that Ethiopia's Aksumite Empire brought the crop to Yemen then. These are hypotheses, not documented facts.

Beyond the cup: coffee as food and husk drink

Among the Oromo of Ethiopia there is buna qalaa (also written bunna qela): coffee cooked in butter. Ramsha Zubairi, in her Smart Mouth newsletter, describes a ritual in which a married woman bites open the coffee fruits and simmers them in butter, tied to blessings, marriage and childbirth. By tradition, she writes, the dish is chewed rather than eaten. We found no document that dates the practice; Zubairi presents it as immemorially old among the Oromo.

In Yemen, qishr is a hot drink of dried coffee husks simmered with spices, usually fresh ginger and cinnamon, as Amelia Dhuga writes in Food & Wine. The claim that it was the first coffee drink has no documented support. Wikipedia describes it as using dried cherry skins that would otherwise have been thrown away after making the bean drink, which suggests a by-product rather than a forerunner. Qishr is made from the same dried coffee-cherry husks now sold as cascara.

Where does the word "coffee" come from?

The last steps are well documented. English took the word from Ottoman Turkish kahve, from the Arabic qahwa. As Ukers wrote in All About Coffee, "The European languages got the name of the beverage about 1600 from the original Arabic", not directly but through Turkish.

What qahwa first meant is unsettled:

• Kaffa. A popular hypothesis ties the word to the Kaffa region. Sir James Murray of the New English Dictionary, quoted by Ukers, described Kaffa as the reputed native place of the coffee plant while adding that there is no evidence for it.
• The reverse. Others claim, on no better authority, that the region was named for the bean, as Weinberg and Bealer note (quoted on Wikipedia).
• Dark, or wine. Wikipedia says qahwah most likely meant dark, and etymologists have also linked it to a word for wine.

Murray adds a point against the Kaffa theory: the plant was called bunn, and the word qahwah was never applied to the berry or the plant. The word named the drink, not the shrub.

How coffee left Yemen

Mocha, the gateway port

For a long stretch, the Yemeni port of Mocha (al-Mukha) was the main gateway for coffee. As Mark Pendergrast writes (quoted by Kat Eschner in Smithsonian Magazine), coffee shipped through Mocha "took on the name of the port". When that dominance ended is debated: Wikipedia says the end of the 17th century, Zaimeche the 18th. Mocha's story is a long one in its own right.

Mecca, 1511

Under Khair Beg, governor of Mecca for the sultan of Egypt, scholars condemned coffee and the city's coffeehouses were shut; Ukers and Wikipedia both date this to 1511. The ban did not last, but accounts of its end differ: Ukers says the sultan ordered the edict revoked, while Wikipedia credits an Ottoman order of 1524.

Istanbul, Venice and Oxford

Coffee reached Istanbul in 1554, says Wikipedia, citing the Ottoman chronicler İbrahim Peçevi; Ukers credits Schemsi of Damascus and Hekem of Aleppo with the first two coffeehouses. The Encyclopaedia Iranica, quoted by Wikipedia, gives 1555 and two men from Damascus; a circulating 1475 date for a Kiva Han coffeehouse conflicts with Peçevi. Coffee reached Europe by the 17th century. In Venice, Wikipedia cites Prospero Alpini for imports from Egypt in 1580, while the National Coffee Association gives 1615 for coffee's arrival; the two dates conflict. England's first coffeehouse, Jacob's at the Angel in Oxford, opened in 1650 (Museum of Oxford) or 1651 (antiquarian Anthony Wood, quoted by Patrick Comerford). What followed is the story of the coffeehouse.

Plant from Ethiopia, drink from Yemen

So, where did coffee originate? The plant, in the shaded mountain forests of southwestern Ethiopia, with an outpost on South Sudan's Boma Plateau. As for the drink, the records point to Yemeni Sufis in the mid-15th century. And the goatherd came later: he first appears in Rome in 1671, by the National Catholic Register's account nameless and set in Yemen.

Keep tracing where your beans come from with more on coffee origins. And if this history makes you want a cup, try brewing with a French press.