29th September: National Coffee Day

It's National coffee day. Here are ten things you possibly didn't know about coffee.

1. Coffee as a drink originated in Ethiopia in the about 9th century. According to legend, goat herders noticed how their Goats behaved after eating coffee berries. It made them dance, apparently. It was only a matter of time before a monk made a drink out of the berries and found it kept him awake. Instant coffee didn't come along until 1906, when it was invented by George Washington. No, not THAT George Washington, but a Belgian bloke living in Guatemala who happened to have the same name.
2. The word coffee comes from the Arabic word ‘kaweh’ meaning strength or vigor. Espresso is an Italian word and means "when something is forced out." Cappuccino comes from the resemblance in the colour of the drink to the clothing of the Capuchin monks. Americano comes from American soldiers, who used to water down their espresso as more dilute coffee was more to their taste. One final word - Kahveci - an expert in preparing Turkish coffee.
3. Coffee is the second most consumed drink in the world after Water and the second most traded commodity after oil. 2.25 billion cups of coffee are drunk around the world every day. 55 million of those are consumed in the UK. The Dutch drink more coffee than any other nation, an average of 2.414 cups each, every day. The biggest producer is Brazil, by a long way (49% of the world's supply), but there are 50 countries which grow it.
4. French novelist and playwright Honore de Balzac supposedly consumed 50 cups of coffee a day; Teddy Roosevelt drank a gallon of coffee every day. We don't know how many cups Beethoven drank each day but we do know he was fussy, insisting on exactly 60 beans per cup. Drinking 100 cups of coffee in quick succession would probably kill you.
5. In Turkey part of the wedding vows a husband made was that he would always provide his wife with sufficient coffee. Not doing so was grounds (sorry!) for divorce. Lack of coffee was the only legal way in ancient Arab culture for a woman to divorce her husband.
6. Coffee shops have often been where revolutions were conceived, which may explain why Charles II tried to ban them in England. English coffee shops also gave us a common word. The proprietors would conspicuously place a brass box with the inscription "To Insure Promptness" to encourage customers to pay for good service. That was the origin of the word "tip" for a gratuity.
7. The world's most expensive coffee is made from beans which have fermented in the stomach of a type of Sumatran wild cat called a luwak, and then been excreted. Well, this is what most coffee fact collections say, but according to Wikipedia, cat poo coffee has competition these days from elephant poo coffee. Elephants in Thailand are fed the beans, which are later collected from their dung. Elephant digestive enzymes allegedly make coffee less bitter.
8. Coffee beans are actually the pits of berries, not beans. They are referred to as beans because they look like beans. People used to mix the berries with fat for an energy rich snack and the pulp could be made into Wine. Yes. Coffee is a fruit. Counts as one of your five a day. Well, probably not, but it would be nice to think so.
9. Coffee hasn't always proved popular with everyone. In 1511 it was banned in Mecca because religious leaders thought it stimulated radical thinking (and we can't have the masses thinking for themselves, now, can we?). Priests in 16th century Italy believed coffee was "Satanic" However, along came Pope Clement VII, who liked the stuff, so he had coffee baptised so it became okay to drink it again (Coffee is therefore possibly the only beverage to undergo a religious conversion). In the Ottoman empire in the 17th century a person could be beaten or executed by being thrown into the sea, just for drinking coffee. In the 18th century it was an offence even to own a coffee cup in Sweden, while in Germany Frederick the Great of Prussia discouraged coffee because it interfered with Beer consumption. British women in 1674 tried to get coffee banned for men under the age of 60, because they felt it was turning their men into ‘useless corpses’.
10. Olympic athletes need to be careful how much coffee they drink because caffeine is on the International Olympic Committee list of prohibited substances. They can be banned from the games if they are found to have more than 12 micrograms of caffeine per millilitre in their urine. Five cups of coffee can be enough to reach this level.

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