The Legend of the Magic Bean, a.k.a Quick Facts On Coffee

Staying awake is hard... which is why I prefer magic beans to do the hard work for me. There are times when it feels like my sole purpose in life is to consume coffee, which means that I feel obligated to share some information about modern life's favourite bean. And I do mean that, since according to the Wiki of Pedia, 'Over 2.25 billion cups of coffee are consumed in the world every day.' Yeeps. 

So here is a helpful, abbreviated summary of the magic bean we call 'coffee'. 

Botany, a.k.a The Species You're Drinking

Coffee is a flowering shrub native to Ethiopia, which coincidentally means it's from the same neck of the woods as our species (no wonder we love it, we evolved right next to it). There are multiple species of coffee plants, but the most significant ones from a coffee addict's perspective are Coffea canephora (also known as 'Robusta' coffee) and C. arabica, the two species which the majority of the world's coffee is made from (60-80% and 20-40% respectively). 

Arabica is the more classy of the two, as it is sweeter and contains less caffeine. It was also the first species of coffee to be domesticated, which adds pedigree to the list of reasons that it is a classy, classy bean.  In contrast Canephora is the workhorse plebeian bean that gets millions of office workers through the day with a bigger jolt and a more bitter taste. There are more species and cultivars than that, but those two are the big ones that evenly match the divide between why people generally drink coffee: for the taste, or to keep from falling asleep after a 10 hour shift. 

Zzzzzzzz... Image sourced from this interesting article!

Coffea as a genus is part of the family Rubiaceae, which interestingly includes the Cinchona plant (which is used to produce Quinine, a.k.a Gin and tonics). So if you ever drink a coffee and a tonic water in the same day, you might just be getting a double dose of Rubiaceae. Except not really, because most quinine these days is synthetic and isn't produced from Cinchona at all. 

Despite many people (including myself, multiple times in this post) referring to the fruit of the coffee shrub as beans, it strictly speaking isn't a bean at all.  A bean is an edible seed, whereas the fruit of coffee plants is botanically speaking a berry: a fleshy fruit lacking a stone. So really we should be calling coffee 'magic berries' instead of magic beans, which honestly sounds just as good. Not to be confused with miracle berries, which are another thing entirely. 

This is what I immediately picture when I think of 'miracle berries'.
And strawberries aren't even a real berry!

Nutrition and Health (or lack thereof)

Whether coffee is actually good for you is a sticky question, and depends largely on how much you drink and when you drink it. The healthiest way to drink coffee is straight black, with no added milk or sugar. This is because coffee contains very little fat or sugar, so plain magic berries aren't going to make you gain any weight at all. So if you want to save your waistline, cut down on the cow juice and monosaccharides in your regular cups of magic berry juice. 

On the nutrition side, coffee is pretty unimpressive. It only contains tiny amounts of potassium and magnesium, and only trace amounts of sodium, manganese, riboflavin and niacin. So while it isn't strictly bad for you, you would die of horrible vitamin-deficiency-caused diseases in short order if you tried to live on nothing but magic berries. 

But the main draw of coffee is the caffeine. To quote coffeeandhealth.org: 

'Caffeine is an effective ergogenic — something that improves athletic performance — it spares muscle glycogen and delays fatigue.'  

That's sounds pretty good, right? But you get diminishing returns on that pretty quickly. The healthy daily dose of caffeine for the average adult is only about 400 milligrams. Which is roughly the amount of caffeine found in four cups of brewed magic berry, and any more than that is probably going to do weird things to you. These include: 

- headaches.
- insomnia.
- nervousness.
- irritability.
- frequent urination and an inability to control urination.
- a faster heart rate. 

People who are sensitive to caffeine naturally need less in order to suffer the less fun side of it, and children and pregnant women should also drink less: about 200 milligrams of caffeine per day at most, or about two cups of brewed magic berries per day. 

So they better stay away (along with probably everyone else) from these five particular brands of coffee I helpfully found on caffeineinformer.com and which I have totally not added to my food/drink bucket list...

Black Insomnia Coffee - A South African blend using an 8 to 2 ratio of canephora to arabica. One standard cup is three times your recommended daily dose of caffeine, so it will definitely live up to its name if you drink it too late in the day. 

High Voltage Coffee - An Australian brand that comes with its own helpful warning label on Caffeine Informer: 'High Voltage Coffee should be consumed with extreme caution and by healthy adults only who have a high tolerance and low sensitivity to caffeine.' And it's not even the strongest coffee on this list. 

Taft Coffee - A Turkish coffee made from over 50 varieties of coffee bean to achieve a non-bitter taste and ludicrous amounts of caffeine: 34 times as much as a standard Coca Cola. 

Very Strong Coffee - Exactly what it says on the tin: it is very, very strong. Produced and sold by the Great British Trading Company, the preceding link even contains a helpful review of the taste and effects. 

Black Label Coffee - Fitting that the Devil Mountain Coffee Company would produce this one. I reckon this might actually kill you if you aren't immune to magic berry enchantment. 

MY HEAAAAAAAARRRT

How Coffee Conquered the World

The first recorded ingestion of coffee by humans dates back to the 15th century in the Arabian peninsula, but there's anecdotal evidence that Ethiopians have been snacking on magic berries for centuries. In particular there is a legend of a goat herder called Kaldi discovering that his goats became hyper energetic and refused to sleep at night after consuming the fruits of the coffee plant. He reported his discovery to the abbot of a local monastery, which resulted in the abbot discovering that drinking the magic berry juice kept him alert through long hours of prayer. 

Coffee as a plant may have originated in Ethiopia, but it was in the Islamic world that it was first cultivated and found its first true fans. The thousands of pilgrims going to and from the holy city of Mecca helped popularise the magic berry: by the 16th century it had spread from Arabia to Persia, Egypt, Syria, and Turkey. Coffee clubs (or qahveh khaneh) became all the rage, not just to drink coffee but to share news, play chess, listen to music or and just generally have a good time. 

From there, it spread to Europe. Rumours of 'the wine of araby' had circulated for ages before coffee hit European shores (and mouths) by the 17th century. Naturally, some people (the clergy) immediately demonized the curious bitter substance, thinking it was satanic devil juice. On the other hand, Pope Clement VIII gave it a go and found the drink so satisfying that he gave it papal approval. 

And then he became the first caffeinated pope. 

Coffee had a similar cultural effect in Europe as it did in the Middle East, with coffee houses springing up all over the place and becoming central to urban  communication and learning. In fact some of the most influential minds of the European Enlightenment period were fueled by coffee, with coffee houses even being nicknamed 'penny universities' in England: for the low, low entry fee of one penny you could have a magic-berry-fueled intellectual conversation with some of the finest minds in Europe. In fact, since coffee houses were attended by all levels of society and were a prime place to discuss ideas, they had a noticeable impact on business and philosophies. The seed of the French Revolution was laid down in the seeds of the caffeinated hubbub, and literature, newspapers and music such as Bach was written in coffee houses. 

The magic berries hit American shores in the 16th century, being brought to New Amsterdam by the Dutch. Barely two centuries later Americans threw British tea in the harbour and coffee became the number one drink in America. Hell, here's a quote from an American you may have heard of: 

"Coffee - the favorite drink of the civilized world." (Thomas Jefferson)

So there you have the low-down on the second-most desired commodity in the world after crude oil. October 1st is international coffee day, so be sure to raise a mug of magic berry juice in salutation of the glorious thing that is coffee. 

And as a public service announcement, here is how not to order takeaway coffee.