A. According to a popular legend, coffee was discovered by an Ethiopian goatherd named Kaldi, who noticed that his goats became unusually lively after eating the red berries of a certain shrub. The story is charming, but it was not written down until the seventeenth century, long after the events it describes, and historians treat it with caution. What is more certain is that the coffee plant grows wild in the highlands of Ethiopia, and that the drink we know today was first prepared across the Red Sea, in Yemen.
B. By the fifteenth century, members of Sufi religious communities in Yemen were drinking coffee to help them stay awake during night-time prayers. From there, the habit spread to the holy city of Mecca and then to Cairo. Public coffee houses appeared, where men gathered to drink, talk, play games and listen to music. Not everyone approved. In 1511 the governor of Mecca banned coffee, believing that coffee houses encouraged opposition to his rule, but the ban was soon overturned, and coffee drinking continued to grow.
C. In the sixteenth century, coffee houses became a feature of life in Istanbul, the capital of the Ottoman Empire. European travellers and merchants encountered the drink there, and in the early seventeenth century Venetian traders began importing coffee into Europe. The first coffee house in England opened in Oxford in 1650, and London's first followed two years later. Within decades, there were hundreds in the city. Because anyone could enter for the price of a cup and join the conversation, they were sometimes called 'penny universities'.
D. English coffee houses became centres of business as well as debate. Merchants, ship owners and insurers met in particular establishments to exchange news. One such place, owned by Edward Lloyd in the late seventeenth century, was popular with people involved in shipping, and it eventually gave its name to Lloyd's of London, one of the world's best-known insurance markets. Governments, however, were sometimes suspicious of these gatherings. In 1675 the English king issued an order to close all coffee houses, but it was withdrawn within days after widespread protest.
E. For a long time, Yemen controlled the supply of coffee, and it is said that exporters tried to prevent live plants or fertile seeds from leaving the country. In the late seventeenth century, however, the Dutch obtained plants and established plantations on the island of Java, in present-day Indonesia. A coffee plant given by the Dutch to the French king was later used to start cultivation in France's Caribbean colonies, and from there coffee spread to Central and South America. By the nineteenth century, Brazil had become the world's largest producer, a position it still holds.
F. Coffee reached Vietnam with French missionaries in the nineteenth century, and plantations were later established in the Central Highlands, where the climate and soil proved ideal for robusta coffee. Today Vietnam is one of the world's leading exporters of coffee. The journey from a wild Ethiopian shrub to a global commodity took several centuries, and it transformed not only diets but also the economies and landscapes of many tropical countries.