A Little Coffee Trivia

Coffee is such a normal part of almost everybody's daily life that we don't give it much thought. The likelihood that you have coffee available to you at home at work and at every street corner where they could jam in a Starbucks are pretty good. And even if you yourself don't drink the stuff, there is no avoiding the plentiful supply of coffee in almost every sector of society and every building both public and private that you might wander into.

Coffee is so popular that a little trivia about it makes for some good chatter around the table at Starbucks. It is the most popular drink coming just under tea and water worldwide. And in terms of gross sales, coffee is by far the most actively traded product in the world second only to petroleum. So if there is ever a coffee embargo, we are all in big trouble!

You probably never thought about where the word "coffee" came from and just thought that that is what it's called and that's all there is to it. But the words from around the world that apply to the drink that comes from coffee beans are pretty diverse including caffe in Italian, keheh in Turkish, gahwa in the Arab world and bunna in Africa. But the word "coffee" may have come to us from Ethiopia where the plant that produces those luscious beans comes from the Kaffa region of the country. Ergo beans from Kaffa = Coffee. You can see the connection.

Despite the tremendous popularity of coffee worldwide, it has not been a drink that has been without controversy throughout history. Even today we occasionally see a scientific study that tries to prove that coffee is bad for you. Then almost the next week another scientific study comes out that proves that coffee is good for you so it's hard to say. For most of us who drink the stuff, it's very good for us indeed.

Even culturally coffee has had its trials and tribulations from time to time. Coffee actually came to the western world through Italy when the beans were imported to Rome from the Middle East. But even in Islamic countries where coffee started its trip to us from, coffee was outlawed from time to time.

When coffee finally reached Italy, it was branded the devils drink by the church because the countries that brought it to the western world were Islamic. It took the pope himself to step in when just as he was about to cave in and declare coffee evil, he insisted on tasting it.

One taste and he was a convert and instead of banning it, he baptized it as "very good indeed" and the Italian went on to give us some of the most delightful coffee drinks including espresso and cappuccino. In fact, it was in an Italian coffee shop that the founder of Starbucks decided to start his worldwide chain of coffee shops.

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