The best-known coffee ceremony is Ethiopia’s: coffee is roasted, ground in a mortar and brewed in a clay jebena, then served in three rounds called abol, tona and baraka. It is not on UNESCO’s intangible heritage list yet, but three other coffee traditions are: Turkish coffee culture, Arabic coffee and Saudi Arabia’s Khawlani coffee beans.
That list is UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, and its three coffee entries are Turkish coffee culture (Türkiye, 2013), Arabic coffee as a symbol of generosity (2015, extended in 2024) and the cultivation of Khawlani coffee beans in Saudi Arabia (2022). Everything below is either quoted from a source you can open or described as method. Nobody at this site has attended any of these ceremonies.
Table of Contents
Ethiopia: the buna ceremony
The most detailed description we can point you at comes from UNESCO’s own magazine. Éloi Ficquet, writing in the UNESCO Courier on 22 March 2023, describes the sequence: “Fresh herbs and flowers are scattered on the ground as a sign of welcome”; “The so-called djebena terracotta cafetière, with its rounded belly and long neck, is filled with water and placed on the fire”; “The beans are ground in a mortar. The grounds are then collected in the palm of the hand, poured into the cafetière and brought back to the boil.” Guests bring “sachets of sugar or spices”, and the coffee is served “along with snacks of toasted seeds and salted popcorn”.
Ficquet’s account starts before the brewing: “The streets of towns and villages are filled with the fragrant fumes of home-roasted coffee, mingled with the scent of burning incense.” In the ceremony itself, “The first act in the ceremony involves each guest wafting the smoke from the roasted beans towards their nostrils with a little movement of the hand.” Once it is ready, “the black brew is poured from a height, without splashing, into little handleless cups with flared rims”, and “Sugar may be added to enhance the taste, or a pinch of salt, especially in rural districts where sugar is scarce and expensive.”
The three servings are the part most often garbled elsewhere. Ficquet gives both the names and the meanings: “Each of these three successive services is designated by a word borrowed from Arabic – abol, tona and baraka, meaning, respectively, ‘first’, ‘second’ and ‘blessing’.” They are three servings in one gathering: after the first, water is poured over the grounds and reheated for the second, and Ficquet places the third a few hours in. They are not three roast levels and not three flavour profiles, which is what a good deal of writing about the ceremony implies.
UNESCO reports that Ethiopia held a national capacity-building workshop on a nomination file on 19-20 February 2025 in Jimma, Oromia, where the head of the Jimma town culture office described the ceremony as “not merely about drinking coffee” but “a deeply rooted tradition that brings people together” (UNESCO). It is not among the nomination files UNESCO lists as under process for 2026, and until a file is accepted, anyone telling you the Ethiopian ceremony is UNESCO-listed is wrong. For the coffee itself and the regional names it is sold under, see our page on Ethiopian coffee beans and regions.
Türkiye: already covered in full elsewhere on this site
Turkish coffee culture is the one tradition here with a UNESCO inscription of its own, made in 2013. Rather than restate it, we will point you at the page that already does the work: what Turkish coffee is and how it works quotes the UNESCO element file and Türkiye’s own Ministry of Culture and Tourism on the powder grind, the cold water added first, the sugar going into the cezve rather than the cup, and the glass of water served alongside. It also explains why the last centimetre of the cup is not meant to be drunk.
The Arabian Peninsula: the other UNESCO coffee
“Arabic coffee, a symbol of generosity” was inscribed in 2015 by the United Arab Emirates, Oman, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, and extended in 2024 to include Jordan. UNESCO’s element file opens: “Arabic coffee highlights an important aspect of generosity in Arab societies and the associated traditions of hospitality” (UNESCO element 01074). Saudi Arabia has a second, agricultural element on the list: “Knowledge and practices related to cultivating Khawlani coffee beans”, inscribed in 2022, covering terrace cultivation and stone milling practised by Khawlani tribes.
Japan: the kissaten, not a coffee ceremony
Chanoyu is a tea ceremony, not a coffee one; the coffee tradition Japan is known for is the kissaten. JAPAN HOUSE Los Angeles, run under Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, translates the word directly — “Literally translating to ‘tea-drinking shop,’ these establishments are associated with coffee but represent much more than cafés” — and dates the origin precisely: “Japan’s first coffee house opened in 1888 when Tei Ei-kei, who had studied at Yale University, established Kahi Chakan in Tokyo.” It closed around 1893 (JAPAN HOUSE Los Angeles).
What makes the kissaten a tradition rather than a café format is the music room. The same source describes ongaku kissa, music kissaten, and names surviving examples — “Santa Claus for jazz lovers, NIKO NIKO-TEI for rock fans, and classical cafés for symphony enthusiasts”. The bargain in those rooms is a cup of coffee for a seat in front of a sound system, sometimes with conversation discouraged. That is a genuine and specific coffee custom, and it is a better answer to “does Japan have a coffee ritual” than borrowing the tea ceremony’s vocabulary.
Italy: the bar, and a UNESCO bid that has not landed
Italy’s coffee custom is a place rather than a procedure: the bar, where espresso is ordered standing at the counter, drunk in a minute or two and paid for on the way out. That is the format the rest of the world imported and then sat down in.
It is worth stating what is not true, because it is widely repeated: Italian espresso is not on the UNESCO intangible heritage list. A search of the lists returns the three coffee elements named at the top of this page, and no Italian one. Italy has put candidacies forward; none has been inscribed. You can check this yourself at ich.unesco.org, which is a more reliable way to settle the question than any article about it, including this one. For the roasting style the phrase “Italian roast” refers to, see Italian roast versus French roast.
Sweden: fika
Fika is the most institutionalised coffee break in the world and the least ceremonial. Sweden’s official tourism site describes it as a break that “holds a much deeper cultural significance in Sweden. It’s a moment to pause, connect and recharge”, notes that “at workplaces across Sweden, fika breaks are often scheduled into the day. Some even have two: one mid-morning and another in the afternoon”, and gives the etymology: “The word itself is believed to be a reversal of the syllables in the word ‘kaffi’, the old spelling of coffee” (Visit Sweden, the official Swedish tourism site). Note what that says and does not say: fika is scheduled, and it is scheduled for the company rather than for the coffee.
The reason it belongs in a list with the buna ceremony is that it does the same job: it is a socially protected occasion, defined by who you drink with rather than by what is in the cup.
South India: filter coffee
India’s coffee begins, by tradition, with a smuggling story that the Government of India itself frames as legend. A Press Information Bureau backgrounder published on 29 November 2025 puts it: “Legend has it that India’s coffee journey began around 1600 AD when Sufi Saint Baba Budan planted seven coffee seeds brought from Mocha port in Yemen in the Baba Budan Giri hills of Chikkamangaluru, Karnataka” (PIB, Brewing Prosperity). The same document records that Indian coffee is grown “across 4.91 lakh hectares in the Western and Eastern Ghats and the North Eastern region”, that smallholders “account for nearly 99 percent of holdings and 70 percent of the country’s overall production”, and that five regional coffees hold Geographical Indication tags: Coorg Arabica, Wayanad Robusta, Chikmagalur Arabica, Araku Valley Arabica and Bababudangiris Arabica.
The drinking culture that grew on top of that was spread in part by the state. The Coffee Board of India — created under the Coffee Act VII of 1942 — says it “promotes coffee consumption in the country through 12 India Coffee Houses located in major cities”. The India Coffee House network is where a great many Indians first drank coffee made this way.
The apparatus is a two-chamber stainless steel filter. Ground coffee goes into the upper chamber under a perforated pressing disc, hot water is poured over it, and it drips slowly into the lower chamber as a concentrated decoction. The decoction is combined with hot milk and sugar, then poured repeatedly between a tumbler and its wide-lipped saucer, the davara, which cools the drink and raises a head of foam. Coffee for this purpose is very commonly blended with roasted chicory. We should be straight about the sourcing here: the Coffee Board’s own published material that we opened describes India’s growing, grading and export in detail and says nothing about the filter, the decoction or the chicory blend. The description above is the method as conventionally practised and described, not something we measured or found in a government document, and we have not put a ratio, a grind size or a chicory percentage on it for that reason.
One thing worth noticing across the whole page: the filter is a piece of metal that stays with the household for decades, and the character of the drink depends on it. If that side of brewing interests you, our page on paper, metal and cloth filters covers what each material does to a cup.
What this page does not cover
No flavour comparisons between these traditions appear on this page. Nobody here has drunk a jebena pour, a kissaten siphon or a Chennai filter coffee, and a description written from a photograph is not a tasting note. No preparation times either: for the Ethiopian ceremony, the answer is the one UNESCO’s writer gives, that the third serving comes a few hours in, which is a statement about the occasion, not a stopwatch reading.
Several other traditions have a fair claim to a place here and are not covered because we have not sourced them properly yet: Vietnamese phin coffee, the Cuban colada shared round an office — our pages on Cuban coffee traditions and the cortadito cover part of that — and the Senegalese café Touba. Absence from this list is not a judgement about them.
Corrections to earlier versions of this page
- An invented visit. An earlier version carried a first-person anecdote in the section on South Indian filter coffee: “I visited a family in Chennai who delighted in showing me this ritual. It felt like a graceful dance, pouring and mixing, making the coffee truly special.” That did not happen: no one who writes for this site made that visit, and it has been removed. It was not the first: our page about carrying coffee beans on a plane carried two invented traveller stories, one of them a “globe-trotting coffee enthusiast”, which were deleted earlier.
- Four unsourced tables. An earlier version carried four comparison tables with no source, among them a “Comparison of Traditional Coffee Ceremonies by Region” table that gave the Ethiopian, Turkish and Japanese ceremonies preparation times and listed “Matcha green tea” as the key ingredient of the Japanese one; another rated ceremonies for “Tourism Impact” and “Cultural Heritage Preservation”. All four have been removed.
- Link sentences. Five sentences existed only to carry internal links, one of them inside the Ethiopian section. They have been removed.
- A Japanese coffee ceremony. An earlier version built a section around a “Japanese coffee ceremony” derived from chanoyu, the tea ceremony. That was a category error; the section now covers the kissaten.
