From Beans to Buzz: A History of Coffee, From Ethiopian Goats to the Third Wave

August is National Coffee Month. Coffee’s journey from an Ethiopian hillside to nearly every kitchen on Earth is full of bans, smuggling, and arguments, and it ends, as all good stories do, in a cocktail glass.

The goats of Kaldi

Coffee comes from the highlands of Ethiopia, where arabica coffee still grows wild. The most famous origin story involves a goatherd named Kaldi, who noticed his goats dancing after eating red berries from a certain shrub, tried them himself, and brought them to a monastery. It’s a great story, but it first appears in writing in 1671, more than a thousand years after it supposedly happened. In Ethiopia, coffee is still at the center of social life, served in a ceremony of roasting, grinding, and brewing that can take hours.

Yemen, Mecca, and the first coffeehouses

The first solid evidence of coffee drinking comes from 15th-century Yemen, where Sufi mystics drank it to stay awake through nighttime prayers. From there it spread across the Muslim world. Coffeehouses opened in Mecca, Cairo, and Damascus, and authorities worried about them immediately. In 1511 the governor of Mecca banned coffee, reasoning that people were gathering in coffeehouses to criticize him. The ban didn’t last. In 1554 the first coffeehouses opened in Istanbul, and they became places to play chess, hear music and storytellers, and argue about politics.

Coffee comes to Europe

Venetian merchants brought coffee to Europe, and Venice’s first coffeehouse opened around 1645. There’s a popular story that priests begged Pope Clement VIII to ban the “Muslim drink” and that he tasted it and blessed it instead. Historians haven’t found evidence it happened, but it’s a good story.

In London, a Greek servant named Pasqua Rosée opened the city’s first coffeehouse in 1652. Within a few decades there were hundreds. They were nicknamed penny universities, because for the price of a cup you could hear news, debate, and conversation. Lloyd’s of London, the insurance market, began in Edward Lloyd’s coffeehouse, where ship captains and merchants traded shipping news. King Charles II tried to shut the coffeehouses down in 1675, worried they were breeding sedition. The public outcry was so loud that he backed down in about two weeks.

To the Americas

European powers raced to grow coffee in their colonies. The Dutch planted it on Java. Around 1720, a French naval officer named Gabriel de Clieu carried a coffee seedling to Martinique, sharing his drinking water with it on the voyage, and most of the coffee in the Americas is said to descend from it. Coffee reached Brazil in 1727, and by the 1800s Brazil was the biggest producer on Earth, a position it still holds. Much of that coffee was grown with enslaved labor, a dark part of the story.

In the American colonies, tea was the drink of choice until the Boston Tea Party in 1773 made drinking it unpatriotic. Coffee became the American drink.

The three waves

• The first wave made coffee cheap and everywhere: vacuum-packed cans of Folgers and Maxwell House, and instant coffee, which soldiers carried in both World Wars.
• The second wave made it an experience. Alfred Peet started roasting dark, high-quality beans in Berkeley in 1966, Starbucks opened in Seattle in 1971, and Americans learned to order lattes.
• The third wave, named around the early 2000s, treats coffee like wine: single origins, direct trade with farmers, light roasts, and tasting notes. That’s the world our coffee guests came from.

Coffee in a cocktail glass

• Café brûlot, a New Orleans tableside show of coffee, brandy, citrus peel, and spices set on fire.
• Irish Coffee, invented in 1943 at the Foynes flying boat terminal in Ireland for chilled transatlantic passengers, and perfected at San Francisco’s Buena Vista Café in 1952.
• The Black Russian, vodka and coffee liqueur, created in 1949 by Gustave Tops at the Hotel Metropole in Brussels.
• The Carajillo, Spain’s and Mexico’s espresso with a splash of brandy or Licor 43.
• The Espresso Martini, from Dick Bradsell in 1980s London.

For a former barista’s take on coffee cocktails and a summer coffee drink that beat ChatGPT, listen to our coffee episode below.

Listen to the episode

“Mmmm… Hot Bean Juice with Brianna Pedro” is Season 1, Episode 8 of Drinking With Robots. Rob talks coffee history and coffee cocktails with former barista Bri Pedro of Killjoy in Raleigh. Listen above, on Buzzsprout, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Drinking With Robots is sponsored by Remedy Cocktail Company, makers of handcrafted cocktail bitters.