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Coffee is a brewed beverages with a dark, slightly acidic flavor prepared from the roasted seeds of the coffee plant, colloquially called coffee beans. The beans are found in coffee cherries, which grow on trees cultivated in over 70 countries, primarily in equatorial Latin America, Southeast Asia, South Asia and Africa.

Coffee berries, which contain the coffee seeds of "beans", are produced by several species of small eve
rgreen bush of genus Coffea. The two most commonly grown are the highly regarded Coffea arabica and the 'robusta' form of the hardler Coffea canephora. The latter is resistant to the devastating coffee lust rust (Hemileia vastatrix). Once ripe, coffee berries are picked, processed, and dried. The seeds are then roasted to varying degrees, depending on the desired flavor.They are then ground and brewed to create coffee. Coffee can be prepared and presented in a variety of ways.

The history of coffee goes at least as far back as the thirteenth century. It has been believed that Ethiopian ancestors of today's Oromo people were the first to discover and recognize the energizing effect of the coffee bean plant. From Ethiopia, coffee was said to have spread to Egypt and Yemen. The earliest credible evidence of either coffee drinking or knowledge of the coffee tree appears in the middle of the fifteenth century, in the Sufi monasteries of Yemen. By the 16th century, it had reached the rest of the Middle East, Persia, Turkey, and northern Africa. Coffee then spread to Italy, and to the rest of Europe, to Indonesia, and to the Americas.

In 2009 Brazil was the world leader in production of green coffee, followed by Vietnam, Indonesia and Colombia. Arabica coffee beans are cultivated in Latin America, eastern Africa, Arabia, or Asia. Robusta coffee beans are grown in western and central Africa, throughout southeast Asia, and to some extent in Brazil.