There are many legendary accounts of how coffee first came to be but the earliest credible evidence of either coffee drinking or the knowledge of the coffee tree appears in the middle of the 15th century in the SUFI monasteries around Mokha in Yemen.  It was here were coffee seeds were first roasted and brewed, in a similar way as it is prepared today.  Yemeni traders brought coffee back to their homeland, from Ethiopia, and began to cultivate the seed.

In 1670, coffee seeds were smuggled out of the Middle East by Baba Budan, as he strapped seven coffee seeds onto his chest.  The first plants grown from these smuggled seeds were planted in Mysore.  It was then that coffee spread to Italy, to the rest of Europe, to Indonesia and to the Americas.

In 1583, Leonhard Rauwolf, a German physician, gave this description of coffee after returning from a ten-year trip to the Near East: