Roasted coffee as a beverage
Café tostado como bebida
- Date
- c. 1450 · confidence medium
- Place
- Mocha, Taiz, Yemen
- Credited to
- Sufis of the Shadhili order in Yemen
- Field
- Life & health
⚠️ Disputed: the sources disagree.
What it is
Yemeni Sufis roasted and ground the seeds of the coffee plant to prepare an infusion that kept them awake for night prayers. From Mocha it passed to Mecca, Cairo and Istanbul, where public coffee houses were born.
The plant comes from Ethiopia; the legend of the goatherd Kaldi is late (1671). The first reliable evidence of coffee drinking is Yemeni, from the mid-15th century (according to al-Jaziri, 1587).
What it led to
- public coffee houses of Istanbul (1554) and the Ottoman world
- world trade in coffee from Mocha
- European coffee houses