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- The earliest evidence for organised coffee drinking is in the Sufi monasteries in Yemen in the 15th C.
- In 1580 a Venetian botanist and physician imported coffee into Venice from Egypt, and from 1645 coffee shops started opening and it became the drink of intellectuals.
- The Knights of St. John in 1565 grew the first European coffee using Turkish Muslim slaves on Malta.
- The Levant Trading Co. brought the coffee culture to England and the first Coffee Houses opened in 1651 in Oxford and 1652 in Cornhill London by a trader in Turkish goods. By 1654 there were 3000 coffee houses in England.
- Antoine Galland (1646–1715) wrote: “We are indebted to these great [Arab] physicians for introducing coffee to the modern world through their writings, as well as sugar, tea, and chocolate.
- The Dutch were first, in 1616, to obtain a coffee bush from Yemen and successfully manage to propagate it, in the Botanic Gardens in Amsterdam, from where plantations were established in Sri Lanka, Southern India, Java and South America in the 17th C.
- Coffee growing started in India in the 1670s introduced from Yemen by an Indian Sufi.
- Brazil became the largest producer of coffee in the world in 1852.