According to legend, coffee was first discovered in 850 A.D., by a shepherd named Kaldi in Kaffa, Ethiopia. Having noticed that his sheep became friskier after eating the red beans from a certain bush, Kaldi tried the beans himself, learning that they had the same effect on humans.

By 1100 A.D., coffee was being grown as an agricultural crop on the Arabian peninsula, where it was first roasted and boiled into a drink called "qahwa"-literally, "that which prevents sleep". In 1475, the first coffee shop, Kiva Han, was opened in Constantinople, Turkey, where it was legal for a woman to divorce her husband for failing to provide her with her daily dose of coffee.

From Constantinople, coffee entered Europe through the port of Venice, introduced by Italian traders in around1600 A.D. Roman Catholic advisers, calling it "the drink of the devil", urged Pope Clement VIII to ban coffee as part of "the infidel threat"; instead, the pope blessed the drink, declaring it a truly Christian beverage.

In 1607, English Captain John Smith (of Pocahontas fame) helped found the colony of Virginia in America and, it's said, brought some roasted coffee beans over with him. Later, in 1713, French naval officer Gabriel de Clieu crossed the Atlantic nurturing a single coffee seedling, which gave rise within 50 years to over 19 million coffee plants across the Caribbean and South and Central America; and, eventually, around 90% of the world's coffee production.

Elsewhere, in 1690, the Dutch became the first to commercially transport and cultivate coffee, in Ceylonand their Indonesian colony, Java. In Europe, the prototype of the first espresso machine was created in France in 1822, but manufactured and perfected in Italy from 1905 to 1945.

In 1963, the first branch of The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf opened in Brentwood, California, serving its share of the over 400 billion cups consumed each year of the world's most popular beverage. Coffee, today, is the second- most traded commodity across the globe, second only to petroleum and more popular than gold.