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Coffee is the greatest drink known to man Here' s why

Katie GrantJan 07, 2015 Serena Williams has credited her victory in her first tennis match of the year to the ‘really good’ cup of coffee she drank during a break. For centuries the caffeinated beverage has left drinkers full of beans…

Discovery

Legend has it a ninth century Ethiopian goat herder discovered coffee by accident when he noticed how the beans were making his goats behave erratically.

Word origin

The word ‘coffee’ entered the English language in 1582 via the Dutch ‘koffie’ borrowed from the Turkish ‘kahve’ taken from the Arabic ‘qahwa’, a truncation of the Arabic word qahhwat al-bun, meaning ‘wine of the bean’.

It inspired Bach

Bach composed a piece known as his Coffee Cantana. ‘Schweigt stille, plaudert nicht’ (Be still, stop chattering), is about a young woman addicted to coffee.

And the invention of the webcam

The first webcam was invented at Cambridge University to let people know when the coffee pot in the computer lab was full.

Around the world

In Europe and North America the amount of coffee drank on average is about a third of the amount of tap water people drink. Coffee is the US's largest food import and second most valuable commodity only after oil.

In numbers

70m cups of coffee are drunk in the UK each day. You need 42 coffee beans to make an espresso, and the drink is considered so essential to daily life in Italy that the price is regulated by the government. More: Albert Einstein's life work affirmed by mildly amusing coffee shop signKeep reading...Show less

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