Where Does Coffee Come From?

What part of the coffee plant are coffee beans?

Coffee beans are the seeds of a fruit called the cherry, which grows on the coffee tree, an evergreen shrub in the Rubiaceae plant family.^[1] Cherries ripen over several months from green through yellow and red to almost black, and are best picked when red.^[1]

Under the cherry's red skin and its pulp lie two beans with their flat sides together.^[1] Each bean is wrapped in a parchment-like covering and, beneath that, a thin membrane called the silver skin.^[1] When a cherry holds only one bean, the bean grows rounder and is called a peaberry.^[1]

Arabica vs robusta: what is the difference?

There are many species of coffee tree, but two dominate world trade: Coffea arabica, known as arabica, and Coffea canephora, usually called robusta after its most widespread variety.^[1]

Arabica is itself a hybrid: a 2024 genome study in Nature Genetics traced it to a natural cross between the ancestors of robusta and another species, Coffea eugenioides, 350,000–610,000 years ago.^[3] Arabica has 44 chromosomes; robusta and Coffea eugenioides have 22 each.^[3]

An FAO coffee-growing manual for Laos calls arabica the higher-quality, higher-value coffee, used for roast and ground coffee.^[2] It describes robusta as generally more vigorous and productive, usually priced 30 to 40% below arabica, and used mainly in instant coffee and in blends, where it adds body and crema.^[2] In a 2014 study in the journal Planta, the mature robusta beans tested contained 50% more caffeine than the arabica beans.^[4]

Where did coffee come from?

Ethiopia is the center of origin of arabica.^[3] A popular story credits a goat herder named Kaldi, who is said to have noticed his goats becoming too lively to sleep after eating the cherries of a tree on the Ethiopian plateau.^[6] It is a legend: the National Coffee Association, a U.S. trade group that tells it, says there is no official documentation of who first discovered coffee trees or invented the drink.^[6] Writing for the BBC, author John McHugo likewise calls the first person to drink wild coffee a "legendary shepherd".^[5]

The earliest cultivation of coffee was in Yemen, in the 15th to 16th centuries.^[3][5] Sufi mystics there used the drink to help them concentrate while chanting the name of God.^[5] Its Arabic name, qahwa, is the source of the words coffee and cafe.^[5]

How did coffee spread around the world?

Coffee was known in Mecca by 1414, and in the early 1500s it spread to Egypt from the Yemeni port of Mocha.^[5] Coffee houses grew up in Cairo and in Syrian cities such as Aleppo, and opened in 1554 in Istanbul, capital of the Ottoman Empire.^[5] Religious authorities in Mecca, Cairo and Istanbul tried to ban it, under Sultan Murad IV (1623–40) even with the death penalty, but every ban failed.^[5]

Coffee reached Europe by two routes, from the Ottoman Empire and by sea from Mocha, where the English and Dutch East India Companies were major buyers in the early 17th century.^[5] Around 1600, the so-called seven seeds were smuggled out of Yemen, founding India's arabica lines, and about a century later the Dutch began growing arabica in Southeast Asia.^[3] A plant shipped to Amsterdam in 1706 was used to start arabica cultivation in the Caribbean in 1723, while the French separately grew it on the island of Bourbon, now Réunion.^[3] Apart from a few wild types from Ethiopia's natural forests, today's arabica cultivars descend from these two lines, known as Typica and Bourbon.^[3]

Where is coffee grown today?

Coffee is a tropical plant grown between about 25° north and 25° south of the equator, and it needs specific conditions of temperature, rainfall, sunlight, wind and soil.^[1] The International Coffee Organization (ICO) estimates world production in the 2025/26 coffee year at 183.6 million 60-kilogram bags.^[8] South America grows 45.8% of it, Asia and Oceania 29.7%, Africa 13.6%, and the Caribbean, Central America and Mexico 10.8%.^[8]

Brazil is by far the largest producer, with nearly 40% of world output, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).^[7] Vietnam, Brazil and Indonesia lead in robusta.^[2][7]

• Brazil63,000
• Vietnam31,700
• Colombia12,500
• Indonesia12,370
• Ethiopia11,560
• Uganda7,095
• India6,430
• Honduras5,530

Source: USDA Foreign Agricultural Service [7]

The USDA's total is lower: it puts 2025/26 world production at 178.8 million bags and counts each country by its own marketing year, which starts in July in Brazil and October in Colombia.^[7] The ICO counts every country over the same October–September coffee year and notes that its figures may therefore differ from crop-year estimates.^[8]

How does a coffee cherry become a cup of coffee?

1. Picking. Cherries are ready 8 to 9 months after the trees flower.^[1] Picking ripe cherries one by one by hand gives the best quality but costs the most; other methods strip whole branches or shake the trees with machines.^[1]
2. Processing. The beans must be taken out of the fruit by the dry or the wet method.^[1] In the dry (natural) method, whole cherries are dried in the sun and then hulled; it is used for about 95% of Brazil's arabica and almost all robusta.^[1] In the wet method, a machine removes the pulp first, and the beans usually sit in fermentation tanks for 24 to 36 hours while natural enzymes break down their sticky coating before washing.^[1]
3. Drying. Dry-method cherries can take up to 4 weeks to reach the target of 11% moisture.^[1] Washed "parchment coffee" starts at about 57% moisture and takes 8 to 10 days to sun-dry to 11%.^[1] Hulling, cleaning and sorting then produce unroasted green coffee.^[1]
4. Roasting. Roasting cuts the beans' weight by about 16% on average and swells them by 50–80%; their color shows how dark the roast is.^[1]