Coffee and Tea for the Record

The origins of the custom of consuming coffee beans (bunn) as a hot brewed beverage (qahwa) are equally hazy. From the scarce information available to us today, we know that coffee beans spread to Yemen around the middle of the sixth century ad during the Abyssinian invasion of southern Arabia. Then reports dealing with the history of coffee jump to the middle of the thirteenth century with the story that the legendary founder of the export city of al-Mukha (Mocha), Shaykh Abu Hasan al-Shadhili, discovered the bean on the Yemeni terraced mountains, and that the villagers introduced him to the beverage. The story goes that al-Shadhili admired its stimulating properties and began spreading the word about it as the best aid for religious thoughts and meditations (Ukers, All about Coffee; Hattox, Coffee and Coffeehouses: The Origins of a Social Beverage in the Medieval Near East).