If you didn’t know coffee can be boosted with good vitamins, now you know it: you’re at Vitamin Coffee! But there are so many interesting facts about your morning friend you don’t know yet.
Blogger Valentina Chirico is here with a guest post to feed your curiosity with 10 facts about coffee:
- Hello, my name is ‘coffee’, and I come from the Arabic world and, more precisely, from the word ‘qahwa’. My original name means ‘exciting’ and with a good reason too! I travelled through Turkey as ‘kahve’ and arrived at you as coffee. - Thanks for your presentation, Mr coffee, but someone says you’re from ‘Kefa’ (Kaffa), in Ethiopia, where your plants grow spontaneously. [1]
- The most expensive coffee in the world, the Indonesian ‘kopi luwak’, could costs you up to 100$ per cup! This touristic ‘attraction’ raised some ethical and ecological concerns lately: it’s made from coffee beans eaten by wild palm civets that, nowadays, are kept in captivity… [2]
- Coffee could help your nap! Strange but true, a study on the effect of caffeine on drivers run by the Loughborough University found that coffee won’t affect your nap. The energising effect of caffeine strikes after 20 minutes, so there’s enough time for a quick and refreshing nap! [3]
- Espresso means ‘express’ in Italian. In fact, a Moka pot makes your coffee stronger and faster than your regular press and filter!
- There was a time when women hated coffee… In 1674, women in London launched a petition, The Women’s Petition Against Coffee, asking for the ban of that ‘newfangled, abominable, heathenish liquor called coffee’. Their husbands were spending too much time at the coffee places! [4]
- Composer Johan Sebastian Bach was a coffee aficionado. He dedicated a work to his favourite drink, title the ‘Kaffeekantate’ and played in Leipzig (Germany) between 1732 and 1735. In this short composition, a father tells off her daughter for drinking too much coffee and warns her: she won’t find any husband that way! [5]
- Coffee could potentially kill: at very high dosage, coffee is extremely dangerous, if not lethal. Coffee toxicity is due to its caffeine content. Let’s say, drinking between 70 and 100 cups in a short time span IS NOT a good idea. [6]
- Decaf, anyone? A naturally decaffeinated coffee DOES NOT exist, except for a particular variety of beans called coffea charrieriana or ‘Charrier coffee’ from Cameroon. Your decaf is produced artificially, but it still contains a minuscule amount of caffeine. The University of Florida says a cup of decaf contains 1/10 of caffeine of a regular espresso. [7, 8]
- The perfect coffee break is between 9:30 and 11:30 in the morning, of course. An American study reveals… [9]
- Coffee stains can be rather artistic! Malaysian artist and architectural designer Hong Yi, aka Red, ‘painted’ a huge portraitof her favourite pop singer, Jay Chou, with just one cup of coffee, a canvas and 12 hours. She asked his hand with this fragrant creation too! [10]
Coffee: loved, hated, analysed, and drunk. The history of coffee is fascinating and will keep you hooked sip after sip.
Valentina Chirico
https://valentinachirico.com
https://italianmemories.wixsite.com/italianmemories
Sources:
[1] https://www.britannica.com/topic/coffee
[2] https://www.businessinsider.com/kopi-luwak-cat-poop-worlds-most-expensive-coffee-taste-test-2018-11?r=US&IR=T
[3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9401427
[4] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/meet-pro-temperance-women-who-crusaded-against-coffee-180965039/
[5] http://www.bach-cantatas.com/Texts/BWV211-Eng3.htm
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caffeine#cite_note-ld50-123
[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coffea_charrieriana
[8] https://news.ufl.edu/archive/2006/10/uf-experts-decaffeinated-coffee-is-not-caffeine-free.html
[9] http://neurosciencedc.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-best-time-for-your-coffee.html
[10] https://mymodernmet.com/hong-yi-red-jay-chou-coffee-stain-portrait/