Mocha Coffee Trade

The Red Sea coffee port that supplied the world's caffeine before Java and Brazil broke Yemen's hold.

Overview

From the 15th century, coffee grown in Yemen's highlands moved through Mocha to Cairo, Istanbul and, via Venetian and Levantine traders, Europe, where coffeehouses spread from Venice in the 1610s. Yemen held a near monopoly until live plants and seeds reached India and, by the 1690s, Java, where the Dutch built plantations that undercut Mocha by the 1720s. Brazilian and Caribbean plantations finished the price collapse. The port later silted and Aden took its role. The name mocha survives for fine coffee, a linguistic fossil of the world's first caffeine entrepot.