Turkish coffee is a style of coffee prepared in a cezve using very finely ground coffee beans without filtering or settling to remove the grounds. Similar beverages go under different names in the Middle and Near East and eastern Europe.

Turkish coffee is very finely ground coffee brewed by boiling. Any coffee bean may be used; arabica varieties are considered best, but robusta or a blend is also used. The coffee grounds are left in the coffee when served. The coffee may be ground at home in a manual grinder made for the very fine grind, ground to order by coffee merchants in most parts of the world, or bought ready-ground from many shops.

Coffee and water, usually with added sugar, is brought to the boil in a special pot called cezve in Turkey, and often called ibrik elsewhere. As soon as the mixture begins to froth, and before it boils over, it is taken off the heat; it may be briefly reheated twice more to increase the desired froth. Sometimes about one-third of the coffee is distributed to individual cups; the remaining amount is returned to the fire and distributed to the cups as soon as it comes to the boil. The coffee is traditionally served in a small porcelain cup called a kahve fincanı 'coffee cup'.

The amount of sugar is specified when ordering the coffee. It may be unsweetened (Turkish: sade kahve), with little or moderate sugar (Turkish: az şekerli kahve, orta şekerli kahve or orta kahve), or sweet (Turkish: çok şekerli kahve). Coffee is often served with something small and sweet to eat, such as Turkish delight. It is sometimes flavoured with cardamom, mastic, salep, or ambergris. A lot of the powdered coffee grounds are transferred from the cezve to the cup; in the cup, some settle on the bottom but much remains in suspension and is consumed with the coffee.

In a paper for the 2013 Oxford Food Symposium, Tan and Bursa identified the features of the art or craft of making and serving Turkish coffee, according to the traditional procedures:

While some of these stages may be curtailed in modern coffee drinking, for example the coffee might be purchased already roasted and ground, the rituals and paraphernalia (e.g. the anticipatory smell of the roasting beans) do act on the imagination and have a psychological effect.

Coffee drinking spread in the Islamic world in the 16th century. From the Hijaz it arrived in Cairo; from thence it went to Syria and Istanbul. The coffee tree was first cultivated commercially in the Yemen, having been introduced there from the rainforests of Ethiopia where it grew wild. For a long time Yemenis had a world monopoly on the export of coffee beans (according to Carl Linnaeus, by deliberately destroying their ability to germinate). For nearly a century (1538–1636), the Ottoman Empire controlled the southern coastal region of the Yemen, notably its famous coffee port Mocha. In the 18th century Egypt was the richest province of the Ottoman Empire, and the chief commodity it traded was Yemeni coffee. Cairo merchants were responsible for moving it from the Yemen to markets in the Islamic world.

Coffee was in use in Istanbul by 1539, for a legal document mentions Ottoman admiral Barbaros Hayreddin Pasha's house had a coffee chamber. It appears that the first coffeehouse in Istanbul was opened in 1554 (some say 1551) by Hakem of Aleppo and Șems of Damascus (they may have been separate establishments at first). Soon, coffeehouses spread all over Istanbul and even to small towns in Anatolia.