Coffee is a beverage brewed from roasted, ground coffee beans. Darkly coloured, bitter, and slightly acidic, coffee has a stimulating effect on humans. Though coffee has become a global commodity, it has a long history tied closely to food traditions around the Red Sea.
The earliest credible reports of coffee drinking pertain to the plant's use among the Sufis of Yemen in the middle of the 15th century. The word coffee entered the English language in 1582 via the Dutch koffie, borrowed from the Ottoman Turkish kahve, borrowed in turn from the Arabic qahwah . By the 16th century, coffee had reached the rest of the Middle East and North Africa. Within the Ottoman Empire, the first coffeehouse opened in 1555 in Tahtakale, Istanbul. Since Tahtakale is to the West of the Bosporus strait, this was the first coffee house in Europe.
Thriving trade brought many goods, including coffee, from the Ottoman Empire to Venice. Coffee became more widely accepted in Europe in 1600, despite appeals to ban the "Muslim drink". Coffee had spread to Italy by 1600 and then to the rest of Europe, Indonesia, and the Americas. The first European coffeehouse outside of the Ottoman Empire opened in Venice in 1647. Through the efforts of the British East India Company, coffee became popular in England. In a diary entry of May 1637, John Evelyn records tasting the drink at Oxford's Queen's Lane Coffee House, established in 1654, which is still in existence today.
There are many stories about coffee and its impact on people and society. The Oromo people would customarily plant a coffee tree on the graves of powerful sorcerers. They believed that the first coffee bush sprang up from the tears that the god of heaven shed over the corpse of a dead sorcerer. Johann Sebastian Bach was inspired to compose the humorous Coffee Cantata, about dependence on the beverage, which was controversial in the early 18th century.
In the United States, coffee is sometimes called a "cup of Joe". The origin of this phrase is in dispute; a common story is that in World War I the US Secretary of the Navy Josephus "Joe" Daniels banned alcohol on navy ships, which meant that the strongest drink available aboard the ship was black coffee. Sailors began referring to coffee as a "cup of Joe" in reference to Daniels.
MMR_00006 > Unknown, Coffee serving tray - Laiko Coffee Grinding ltd., Tin, 25 cm diameter, ca. 1950
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