Coffee drinking begins in Yemen

c. 1450MajorContested

Sufis in Yemen brew coffee from Ethiopian-origin beans to stay awake for night prayers. The earliest reliable evidence of coffee as a drink dates from this mid-15th-century setting.

Longest chain: The Big Bang → First stars ignite → Supernovae seed heavy elements → The Sun forms → Earth forms → First oceans → First life → Photosynthesis evolves → Great Oxidation Event → Complex cells (eukaryotes) → Multicellular life → First animals → Cambrian Explosion → First vertebrates → Jawed fish → Fish walk onto land → The amniotic egg → The Great Dying → Dinosaurs appear → Asteroid ends the dinosaurs → Early primates → Apes split from monkeys → Human line splits from chimpanzees → Walking upright → First stone tools → Genus Homo appears → Homo erectus → Control of fire → Habitual fire and cooking → Homo sapiens appears → Complex language → Natufian villages → Oldest known bread → Agriculture begins → Irrigation → Uruk and the first cities → Cylinder seals → Writing (cuneiform) → Babylonian mathematics → Babylonian astronomical diaries → Thales and natural philosophy → Trial and death of Socrates → Plato's Academy → Aristotle's Lyceum → Alexander's conquests → Death of Alexander and the Hellenistic kingdoms → Seleucid Empire founded → Parthian Empire founded → Sasanian Empire → Birth of Muhammad → Muhammad's first revelations → The Hijra → Conquest of Mecca → Death of Muhammad and the Rashidun caliphate → Arab conquests → Abbasid Caliphate → Nizamiyya madrasa of Baghdad → Al-Ghazali and Sufism → Coffee drinking begins in Yemen

Contested history

Consensus: Coffee plants are native to Ethiopia, but the earliest reliable evidence of coffee as a brewed drink comes from Sufi circles in Yemen in the mid-1400s.

Coffee drinking began among Yemeni Sufis in the 15th centuryEstablished

Arabic sources studied by historians such as Ralph Hattox place the first coffee drinking in Yemen's Sufi orders around the mid-1400s.

A goatherd named Kaldi discovered coffee in EthiopiaUnsupported

The Kaldi story first appears in a 1671 European text, two centuries after the earliest records, and has no earlier source.

Ethiopians used coffee long before YemenSpeculation

Wild Coffea arabica grows in Ethiopia and local use is plausible, but no documentary or archaeological evidence dates it earlier.