The Birth of Coffee - Sufra Time at Mocha Box Coffeehouse

The bean was born in Ethiopia. Coffee was born in Yemen.

You may drink it every morning. You may know exactly how you take it. You may even believe you can't function without it.

But how much do you really know about the extraordinary drink in your cup?

Join us at MochaBox Coffeehouse for Sufra Time: The Birth of Coffee, an immersive evening of Arabian food, coffee, history, humor, science, and storytelling that follows one of the world's most beloved drinks from the mountains of Arabia to almost every corner of the planet.

And what a journey it is.

We'll begin with dancing goats and an Ethiopian legend. Then we'll cross the Red Sea into the spectacular mountains of Yemen, where coffee became something much bigger than a mysterious fruit growing on a tree.

There, Yemeni Sufis discovered that qahwa could help them remain awake during long nighttime devotions. Farmers cultivated coffee on dramatic mountain terraces. And from the Yemeni port of Mocha, ships eventually carried a new drink into a world that would never be quite the same again.

Then things get wonderfully complicated.

Meet Baba Budan, the legendary pilgrim said to have smuggled seven precious coffee beans out of Yemen and helped break its grip on the coffee trade.

Cross an ocean with Gabriel de Clieu, who carried a coffee plant toward the Caribbean and, according to his own account, shared his precious water ration with it when supplies ran desperately low.

Encounter kings who tried to fight coffee, coffeehouses that transformed social life, and some wonderfully strange episodes from coffee history.

And yes, we'll even ask:

How would YOU smuggle seven coffee beans past TSA?

Then we'll follow coffee into the modern world—through coffeehouses across continents, surprising foods and products made from coffee, the Yemeni tradition of qishr, and even inside your own brain to discover what caffeine actually does after you take that first glorious sip.

But ultimately, this evening isn't really about caffeine.

It's about people.

Because thousands of miles from Yemen, here in the mountains of Appalachia, something about this story feels surprisingly familiar.

Two mountain cultures developed powerful traditions of hospitality, storytelling, craftsmanship, faith, self-reliance, and gathering together over a warm drink. The landscapes are different. The histories are different.

The human instinct is remarkably familiar.

And that's the heart of Sufra Time.

This isn't a history lecture.

Over Arabian food and coffee at a shared table, we'll travel across mountains and oceans, encounter legends and adventurers, laugh at some of history's stranger moments, test what you think you know, and discover just how much history is hiding inside something you probably held in your hand this morning.

By the end of the evening, you may never look at a cup of coffee quite the same way again.

Because two hours earlier, it was just coffee.

Now it's a story.

Sufra Time: The Birth of Coffee
MochaBox Coffeehouse · Asheville, NC

The bean was born in Ethiopia. Coffee was born in Yemen. Around the world, we turned it into a reason to gather.