The History of Coffee: From a Goatherd in Ethiopia to Your Cup

It started with a goat, allegedly. Somewhere around the 9th century, in the highlands of what’s now Ethiopia, a goat herder named Kaldi apparently noticed his flock going a bit haywire after eating berries off a particular tree. Restless, unusually energetic, refusing to sleep, the goats had found coffee cherries. Kaldi, being reasonably curious, tried them himself. History, or at least the legend, records that it went well.

Whether that story is literally true is debatable. That coffee originated in Ethiopia isn’t.

I’m a bit of a sucker for this story, honestly. Every time I tell it at the hatch someone says “wait, a goat?” with exactly the right amount of disbelief, and I get to say yes, a goat, completely unbothered, like it’s the most normal origin story for a global industry. Compared to some tech origin stories I’ve heard, it kind of is.

Ethiopia to Arabia: the first coffeehouses

Coffee cultivation and actual brewed coffee drinking seem to have started in earnest in Yemen around the 15th century, using beans sourced across the Red Sea from Ethiopia. Sufi monks apparently used it to stay awake for nighttime prayers, which is honestly the most relatable use case in this entire history. The habit spread fast from there.

By the 16th century, coffeehouses, qahveh khaneh, were everywhere across the Ottoman Empire: Istanbul, Cairo, Mecca. These weren’t just places to get a drink, they became genuinely important social institutions, somewhere men gathered to play chess, argue, listen to music and do business. People called them “schools of the wise,” which is a much better name than anything we’ve called a coffee shop since.

There were a few attempts to ban coffee too, by Ottoman sultans who found the social gathering a bit too politically convenient for other people, and by a Mecca governor who thought it encouraged rebellious behaviour. All of the bans failed. Coffee, it turns out, is stubborn.

Coffee takes over Europe

Coffee reached Europe in the 17th century and became an enormous deal almost immediately. London got its first coffeehouse in 1652. Within a few decades there were more than 300 of them, functioning as proto-offices, proto-stock-exchanges and proto-newspapers, you genuinely went there to catch up on the news of the day.

Lloyd’s of London, now one of the biggest insurance markets in the world, started life as a coffeehouse. The London Stock Exchange grew out of Jonathan’s Coffee House. A fair chunk of the Enlightenment apparently happened over coffee, which is a nice thought to have while roasting a batch at 6am on a Tuesday.

Where the map gets uncomfortable

The Dutch were first to successfully grow coffee outside Arabia and Ethiopia, planting it in what’s now Indonesia in the late 1600s. From there the French brought it to Martinique, and from a single plant on that island, most of Latin America’s coffee cultivation eventually spread.

Worth being honest about: that expansion happened largely through colonialism, which sits a bit uncomfortably next to an industry that likes to talk about itself as progressive and fair-trade minded now. I think understanding that history is part of why direct trade and fair prices for growers actually matter, not just as a marketing line but as something worth taking seriously when you’re deciding what to buy.

Where a small roastery in Blouberg fits into any of this

The “third wave,” which is roughly what people mean by the specialty coffee movement, got going properly in the 1990s and 2000s. After decades of commodity coffee built around quantity and price, a newer generation of roasters, farmers and importers started treating coffee more like wine, an agricultural product with a real terroir, worth understanding and paying for properly.

That’s the tradition I’m trying to be a small, fairly new part of. Not because it’s trendy, but because once you’ve tasted the difference between an averaged-out blend and a coffee with an actual name attached to it, it’s hard to go back to not caring. We’re a tiny operation out of Blouberg, nowhere near old enough to claim any of this history as our own, but I like knowing what we’re standing on top of every time I load the roaster. If you want to see how that history shows up in your actual cup, how the coffee was processed is a good next thing to read about. Or for the full, much longer version of everything above, Wikipedia’s history of coffee goes considerably deeper than I have room for here.