Open the doors to our cafe and you will be greeted with the heavenly aroma of some of the country’s most delicious beans brewing behind the counter. We are often told by international visitors that our coffee is the “best cup they’ve had in the USA”. This is for good reason. We brew “Late for the Train” Coffee, a local coffee roastery whose meticulous attention to detail produces a delicious full bodied espresso that we think is pretty hard to beat.

Local Sustainable Options

We believe in healthy people and healthy communities. For this reason our cafe is stocked with local sustainable food options supplied by local vendors. Our sandwich and salad selection is provided by 7 ate 9, a Flagstaff Based “mom and pop” shop that deliver fresh delicious food for our patrons. We also carry bagels from Biff’s Bagels and constantly look to add more fresh options from our neighbors!

Hours of Operation

April-November: 6am-8pm
December-March: 7am-7pm
Closed: Christmas Day; Some public holidays have modified hours-call ahead.

The history of coffee goes at least as far back as the thirteenth century with a number of myths surrounding its first use. The original native population of coffee is thought to have come from East Africa, and it was first cultivated by Arabs from the 14th century. 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 Yemen. By the 16th century, it had reached the rest of the Middle East, Persia, Turkey and northern Africa. Coffee then spread to Balkans, Italy and to the rest of Europe, to Indonesia and then to the Americas.

Etymology

The word "coffee" entered English in 1582 via Dutch koffie, borrowed from Turkish kahve, in turn borrowed from Arabic qahwa, a truncation of qahhwat al-bun 'wine of the bean.

Possible first uses

There are several legendary accounts of the origin of the drink itself. One account involves the Yemenite Sufi mystic Ghothul Akbar Nooruddin Abu al-Hasan al-Shadhili. When traveling in Ethiopia, the legend goes, he observed birds of unusual vitality, and, upon trying the berries that the birds had been eating, experienced the same vitality.
Other accounts attribute the discovery of coffee to Sheik Abou'l Hasan Schadheli's disciple, Omar. According to the ancient chronicle (preserved in the Abd-Al-Kadir manuscript), Omar, who was known for his ability to cure the sick through prayer, was once exiled from Mocha to a desert cave near Ousab. Starving, Omar chewed berries from nearby shrubbery, but found them to be bitter. He tried roasting the beans to improve the flavor, but they became hard. He then tried boiling them to soften the bean, which resulted in a fragrant brown liquid. Upon drinking the liquid Omar was revitalized and sustained for days. As stories of this "miracle drug" reached Mocha, Omar was asked to return and was made a saint.

Another possibly apocryphal account involves a 9th-century Ethiopian goat-herder, Kaldi, who, noticing the energizing effects when his flock nibbled on the bright red berries of a certain bush, chewed on the fruit himself. His exhilaration prompted him to bring the berries to a Monk in a nearby monastery. But the monk disapproved of their use and threw them into the fire, from which an enticing aroma billowed and the monks came out to investigate. The roasted beans were quickly raked from the embers, ground up and dissolved in hot water, yielding the world's first cup of coffee. The story is first known to appear in writing in 1671, and thus may be fanciful.
Coffee was mainly consumed in the Islamic world when it first originated and was very directly related to religion.

The Ethiopian ancestors of today's Oromo ethnic group, were the first to have recognized the energizing effect of the native coffee plant. Studies of genetic diversity have been performed on Coffea arabica varieties, found to be of low diversity but which retained some residual heterozygosity from ancestral materials, and closely related diploid species Coffea canephora and C. liberica;[8] however, no direct evidence has ever been found indicating where in Africa coffee grew or who among the natives might have used it as a stimulant or known about it there earlier than the seventeenth century. The original domesticated coffee plant is said to have been from Harar, and the native population is thought to be derived from Ethiopia with distinct nearby populations in Sudan and Kenya.