user: Please give me a brief history of coffee.

assistant: African origins
Whilst the exact origins of coffee aren’t clear, there are some popular myths and legends surrounding its discovery.
Our favourite story is that it was discovered by an Ethiopian goatherd in the 10th century, who noticed his goats were full of energy and had trouble sleeping after eating the red berries of a certain bush! He tried the berries himself, before sharing them with some monks, who boiled the berries with some water to make a powerful stimulant drink to keep them awake during lengthy prayer sessions.
Other Roman and Arabian legends point to coffee being discovered much earlier – both mention a black, bitter beverage with magical stimulating powers.
In reality, all we know for sure is that coffee is indigenous to the Kaffa region of modern day Ethiopia, and that Yemeni traders first took it from there across the Arabian peninsula sometime around the start of the 12th century. By the 15th century, it was being cultivated in Yemen, and people had begun to roast the beans, to create a primitive form of the drink we know and love today.

Middle Eastern Expansion
From Yemen, coffee spread out North, across the Middle East, and by the 16th century, it has become a popular drink in Persia, Syria, Egypt and Turkey.
The first coffee houses had also begun to spring up, and quickly found favour as social centres, where people would gather to watch music, enjoy entertainment, share information and discuss important issues.
Word about coffee quickly spread, as pilgrims from all over the world going to Mecca discovered the drink for the first time. It wasn’t long before news about coffee reached European ears…

Coffee comes to Europe
European travellers and merchants first brought coffee back from the Near East at the end of the 16th century, and by the 17th century, it was becoming popular across Italy, Germany, France and England.
However, coffee wasn’t without its opponents – when North African traders first brought coffee to Venice in around 1600, the Catholic church were vehemently opposed to it, and made appeals to the Pope to ban the drink. Thankfully, the Pope insisted that he tried coffee before making a decision, and liked it so much that he gave it full Papal approval!
Just as they had in the Arab world, hundreds of coffee houses sprang up in major cities across Europe, and quickly became important centres for the discussion and development of new political and religious ideas. In England, they became so influential that Charles II tried to ban them in 1675 – but protests were so severe that the ban was repealed after just 11 days.
Within 100 years, coffee had become immensely popular across the continent, and the European powers started looking at how they could wrestle the trade monopoly on coffee away from the Arab world.

To the new world
European traders soon began taking coffee with them to the far reaches of their empires. The Dutch were the first to start growing it, establishing estates in Sri Lanka, Ceylon and Java in the 17th century.
The French and British followed suit, creating plantations in the Caribbean, before the Spanish and Portuguese introduced it to their colonies in South America.
It was the British who first exported coffee to the American colonies in the mid 17th century, although it didn’t become popular until the American Revolution, when excessive taxes on tea turned coffee into the patriots drink!