18 Fun Facts About Coffee
Because I’ve still got a coffee hangover from my previous post, here’s a list of the most interesting, fun facts about coffee I’ve come across:
- Coffee is the most-consumed beverage in the world, with some 400 billion cups being drunk daily, worldwide.
- Unlike the younger baristas in Western coffee shops, the average age of baristas in Italy is 48, and being a barista is considered a highly respected profession.
- The great composer-musician Johann Sebastian Bach wrote a comic opera entitled “The Coffee Cantata” between 1732-1734 about people’s addiction to coffee.
- In ancient Turkish culture, bridegrooms had to vow to always provide their wives with coffee. Otherwise, it was grounds for divorce.
- Sept. 29 is “National Coffee Day” in the USA.
- The second place where coffee is most consumed is in the workplace.
- 91% of coffee consumed is taken at breakfast, most of the time because it is breakfast.
- George Washington – an English chemist living in Guatemala – claimed to have invented instant coffee in 1906.
- The world’s supply of coffee is grown in the “bean belt,” the area along the equator between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn.
- Coffee is the second largest traded commodity on earth, second only to oil.
- Plain black coffee with no add-ins contains zero calories.
- James Mason invented the coffee percolator on December 26, 1865.
- Coffee trees can live for up to 100 years, and can grow up to 30 feet tall, but are cultivated to grow shorter for easy harvesting.
- Melitta Bentz, a German housewife, was the first to come up with coffee filters in 1908.
- Two of history’s most famous revolutions were plotted in coffee houses: the American and the French Revolutions.
- The lethal dose of coffee is around 100 cups of coffee at one time.
- Lightly roasted coffee beans contain more caffeine than dark ones.
- Tipping waiters started in European coffee houses, where you had to pay big if you wanted good service and attention, as these coffee houses were usually noisy and chaotic.
