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The plant before the drink
Coffea arabica is a shrub of the understorey. It wants shade, altitude and a dry season — conditions that occur naturally in the highland forests of southwestern Ethiopia and almost nowhere else at the same time.
For most of its history the plant was chewed, not brewed. The cherries were crushed with fat and carried as food on long journeys. Roasting the seed and steeping it in water is a comparatively recent idea.
Yemen, and the first monopoly
By the fifteenth century coffee was being cultivated across the Red Sea in Yemen, where Sufi orders drank it to stay awake through night prayer. The port of Mocha gave its name to the trade, and for roughly two hundred years Yemen was the only place on earth that sold coffee.
The monopoly held because only processed beans left the country. A roasted or boiled seed will not germinate. It ended, as these things do, through smuggling: seedlings reached India, then Java, then the botanical gardens of Amsterdam and Paris, and from there the Americas.
What this means for the coffee you drink
The consequence of that narrow bottleneck is still with us. Commercial arabica descends from a very small founding population, which is why the crop is unusually vulnerable to disease and to a warming climate.
That is also why direct trade with Ethiopian farms matters more than it sounds: the genetic diversity the crop will need is still growing wild in the forests where it started.
