Why this comparison matters

Every cup of coffee you drink today — from a specialty pour-over to a supermarket capsule — descends in some way from these two traditions. The Arab world gave coffee its name, its first coffeehouses and its culture of hospitality. Italy gave it espresso, the brewing method that now underpins almost every café menu on earth, including the cortado, the cappuccino and the flat white.

Understanding the difference between them also makes you a better coffee drinker. Once you see why Arabic coffee is roasted light and simmered with spices, and why Italian espresso is roasted darker and extracted under pressure, you start to understand how roast, grind, time and temperature shape every cup you taste.

Arabic coffee — where it all began

Coffee's story as a drink begins on the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula. The plant itself originated in the highlands of Ethiopia, but it was in Yemen, in the fifteenth century, that coffee was first roasted, brewed and drunk in a way we would recognise. Sufi communities used it to stay awake through long nights of prayer and devotion. From Yemen it travelled to Mecca, Cairo, Damascus and Istanbul, and by the sixteenth century coffeehouses had become centres of conversation, music, poetry and debate across the Middle East.

The port of Mocha on the Red Sea coast became the world's great coffee market, which is why the word "mocha" still echoes on café menus today. Even the word "coffee" itself comes, through Turkish and Italian, from the Arabic qahwa.

What "Arabic coffee" actually means

Arabic coffee, or qahwa arabiyya, is a family of related styles rather than one fixed recipe. In the Gulf, it is often made from very lightly roasted beans, producing a pale, golden-brown drink flavoured generously with cardamom and sometimes saffron. In Jordan and across the Levant, the Bedouin qahwa sada ("plain coffee") is typically roasted darker, brewed long and strong, and spiced with cardamom — bitter, concentrated and served in tiny amounts.

What unites all these styles is not the roast but the meaning. Arabic coffee is a language of hospitality. Offering it says you are welcome here; accepting it says I respect your home.

Italian coffee — the invention of espresso

Coffee reached Italy through Venice, whose merchants traded heavily with the Ottoman Empire. By the seventeenth century the first coffeehouses had opened in the city, and within a few decades they had spread across the peninsula. Some, like Caffè Florian in Venice's Piazza San Marco, which opened in 1720, are still serving today.

But Italy's real contribution came at the turn of the twentieth century, with the race to make coffee faster. Angelo Moriondo patented an early steam-driven brewing machine in Turin in 1884. In the early 1900s, Luigi Bezzera and Desiderio Pavoni developed and commercialised machines that brewed a single cup in moments — the word espresso captured that idea of something made "expressly" for you, on demand.

The modern espresso arrived after the Second World War, when Achille Gaggia's spring-lever machine pushed water through the coffee at much higher pressure. The result was a thicker, more concentrated drink topped with a golden layer of foam — crema — and the espresso we know today was born. At home, meanwhile, Alfonso Bialetti's aluminium moka pot, introduced in 1933, brought strong stovetop coffee into almost every Italian kitchen.

"Arabic coffee asks you to stay. Espresso lets you go. Both are forms of respect."

— Cortado Coffee House, Madaba

Beans and roast levels

Roast level is where the two traditions diverge most visibly — and it shapes everything that follows.

The Arabic approach

Traditional Gulf-style Arabic coffee uses Arabica beans roasted very lightly, sometimes barely past the first colour change. This preserves bright, grain-like and herbal notes and creates a thin, tea-like drink that lets the cardamom shine. Levantine and Bedouin styles roast darker, often over an open fire in a long-handled pan called a mihmas, producing a stronger and more bitter brew. Either way, the beans are usually roasted fresh and in small batches, sometimes in front of the guests.

The Italian approach

Italian espresso is generally roasted from medium-dark to dark. Darker roasts dissolve more easily under pressure, reduce sharp acidity, and develop the chocolate, caramel and toasted notes that Italians expect. Many classic Italian espresso blends — especially in the south — include a proportion of Robusta, which adds body, bitterness, a thicker crema and extra caffeine.

How each is prepared

Arabic coffee: time and patience

Arabic coffee is brewed by simmering. Ground coffee is added to water in a pot, brought to the boil and left to simmer gently, often for ten to twenty minutes. Ground cardamom is added toward the end, the pot is taken off the heat, and the grounds are allowed to settle before the coffee is poured into the serving pot — the elegant, beak-spouted dallah. Some households strain it through palm fibre; others simply pour carefully so the grounds stay behind.

Italian espresso: pressure and precision

Espresso is brewed by pressure. Hot water at around 90–94°C is forced through a compact puck of finely ground coffee at roughly nine bar of pressure. In about 25–30 seconds, the machine produces a small, intense shot crowned with crema. Every variable matters: a slightly finer grind, a gram more coffee, or a few degrees of temperature can change the taste dramatically. That is why good baristas calibrate their espresso every morning.

Flavour profiles side by side

Taste the two next to each other and the contrast is immediate. They barely seem like the same drink.

Notice how much of the Arabic coffee experience comes from aroma: the cardamom often reaches you before the cup does. Espresso, by contrast, is all about texture and concentration — the weight of the shot on your tongue and the way the flavour lingers after you swallow.

Rituals and etiquette

The Arabic coffee ceremony

Serving Arabic coffee follows unwritten but well-understood rules. The host — or the youngest member of the family — holds the dallah in the left hand and serves with the right. The small handleless cup, the finjan, is filled only a little, never to the top, so the coffee stays hot and can be refilled often. The guest of honour, or the eldest, is served first.

Guests accept the cup with the right hand. The host will keep refilling until the guest gently shakes the cup from side to side, the polite signal for "thank you, that's enough". Coffee is often accompanied by dates, and in many households it is customary to accept at least one cup — refusing outright can feel like refusing the welcome itself.

The Italian bar

Italian coffee culture is just as codified, only faster. Ask for "un caffè" and you will receive an espresso — no need to say the word. Many Italians drink it standing at the bar, in two or three sips, often paying a lower price than at a table. Milky drinks like cappuccino are traditionally a morning affair, rarely ordered after a meal. And in Naples, the generous custom of the caffè sospeso — paying for an extra coffee for a stranger who cannot afford one — shows that hospitality is part of Italian coffee culture too.

Caffeine and strength

"Strong" means different things in each tradition. A single espresso shot contains roughly 60–75 mg of caffeine in about 30 ml — very concentrated, but a small total dose. A cup of Arabic coffee is even smaller, often just a few sips, so each cup usually contains less caffeine than an espresso. The catch is that Arabic coffee is rarely a single cup: three cups, then a few more over a long evening, can add up quickly.

Roast level matters less than most people think. Darker roasts taste stronger because of their bitterness, but by weight the caffeine difference between light and dark roasts is small. What really changes the caffeine you consume is how much coffee goes into the cup and whether Robusta is in the blend — Robusta contains roughly twice as much caffeine as Arabica.

The full comparison table

Making both at home

A simple Arabic coffee

1. Boil the water

   Bring about 500 ml of water to the boil in a small pot or dallah.

2. Add the coffee

   Stir in 3–4 tablespoons of lightly roasted, medium-ground Arabic coffee. Lower the heat and simmer gently for 10–15 minutes, watching that it does not boil over.

3. Add the cardamom

   Add a heaped teaspoon of freshly ground cardamom (and a few saffron threads if you like) and simmer for another two or three minutes.

4. Let it settle

   Take the pot off the heat and leave it for a few minutes so the grounds sink to the bottom.

5. Pour and serve

   Pour gently into a thermos or dallah, leaving the sediment behind, and serve in small cups with dates.

A better espresso — or something close

True espresso needs a machine capable of around nine bar of pressure. If you have one, start with about 18 g of freshly ground coffee and aim for roughly 36 g of liquid in 25–30 seconds, then adjust the grind to taste: finer if it's sour and fast, coarser if it's bitter and slow. Without a machine, a moka pot makes a strong, Italian-style coffee — use fresh water just below the valve, don't tamp the coffee, and take it off the heat as soon as it starts to gurgle.

Common myths and mistakes

• Calling Arabic coffee and Turkish coffee the same thing. Turkish coffee is ground extremely fine, brewed in a small cezve, often sweetened, and served with the grounds still in the cup. Arabic coffee is spiced, unsweetened and poured without the grounds.
• Filling the finjan to the brim. In some Arab traditions, a full cup is even said to suggest that the guest should drink and leave. A small pour is a sign of welcome.
• Assuming crema always means quality. Thick crema can come from Robusta or very fresh beans, but taste is what counts. Some excellent espressos have modest crema.
• Adding sugar to Arabic coffee. It is traditionally served unsweetened; the sweetness comes from the dates eaten alongside it.
• Ordering "a latte" in Italy and expecting coffee. In Italian, latte simply means milk. Ask for a caffè latte instead.
• Thinking one tradition is "real" coffee. Both are complete, refined cultures with centuries of knowledge behind them. The best way to appreciate either is to understand the other.

Both traditions in Madaba

In Madaba, both cultures live side by side. In homes, shops and gatherings across the city, a guest will almost always be offered a small cup of cardamom-scented Arabic coffee. It is part of the fabric of daily life, and no visit to Jordan is complete without it.

At Cortado Coffee House on Al-Yarmouk Street, our craft comes from the other branch of the family tree: espresso. Our baristas calibrate every morning, pulling and tasting shots until the extraction is exactly right, then build our menu on that foundation — from a straight espresso to the drink we are named after, the cortado, which cuts a shot with an equal amount of warm milk. Our single-origin coffees from Colombia and Ethiopia show how far espresso has travelled from its Italian roots while keeping the same precision at its heart.

Our advice? Try both. Accept the finjan when it is offered, shake the cup when you have had enough — and then come and taste what pressure, precision and fresh beans can do.