Coffee: Stories exist of coffee originating in Ethiopia, but the earliest credible evidence of either coffee drinking or knowledge of the coffee tree appears in the middle of the 15th century, in the Sufi monasteries of the Yemen in southern Arabia.[163][164] It was in Yemen that coffee beans were first roasted and brewed as they are today. From Mocha, coffee spread to Egypt and North Africa,[165] and by the 16th century, it had reached the rest of the Middle East, Persia and Turkey.