The story of how the cultivation and consumption of coffee spread throughout the world is one of the most attractive and romantic there can be. That story begins in the Horn of Africa, in Ethiopia, where the coffee tree probably originated in the province of Kaffa. There are various fanciful but unlikely accounts of how the attributes of the roasted coffee bean were discovered.

One of them says that an Ethiopian goat herder was amazed by the lively behavior of the goats after they had chewed red coffee cherries. What is known with more certainty is that the slaves who were taken from what is now the Sudan to Yemen and Arabia through the then great port, Moca, now synonymous with coffee, ate the succulent meaty part of the coffee cherry What is certain is that coffee was grown in Yemen as early as the 15th century and probably much earlier as well.

At first, the Yemeni authorities strongly encouraged the consumption of coffee, as its effects were considered preferable to the stronger effects of “Kat”, a shrub whose leaves and buds were chewed as a stimulant. The first establishments to serve coffee was opened in Mecca and were called “kaveh kanes”. This type of establishment spread rapidly throughout the Arab world, and the cafes became popular venues for playing chess, exchanging gossip, and enjoying singing, dancing, and music. The establishments were luxuriously decorated and each of them had its character.

There had never been anything like the coffee shop before a place where you could socialize and conduct business in comfortable surroundings and where everyone could go for the price of a coffee. Arab coffee shops soon became centers of political activity and were suppressed. Then, in the following decades, coffee and coffee establishments were banned several times, but they kept coming back.

Eventually, a solution was found: coffee and coffee establishments had to pay taxes. The Dutch also began to grow coffee in Malabar, India, and in 1699 brought some to Batavia, Java, in what is now Indonesia. A few years later, the Dutch colonies had become the main source of coffee supply to Europe. Today Indonesia is the fourth largest coffee exporter in the world.