Let us start off with some trivia:

• Coffee is the most popular drink worldwide with over 400 billion cups consumed each year.
• Coffee ranks second only to petroleum in terms of dollars traded worldwide (about $10.4 billion in exports in 2000).
• It takes 42 coffee beans to make an espresso.
• On average, men drink more coffee than women (1.7 cups per day vs 1.5 cups)
• 37% of coffee drinkers drink their coffee black; while 63% add a sweetener such as sugar.
• Instant coffee accounts for 13% of all coffee drunk.
• 57% of coffee is drunk at breakfast; 34% between meals and 13% at other meals.
• It is estimated that more than 100 million Americans drink a total of 350 million cups of coffee a day.
• About half of all American adults have a cup of coffee to start their day.
• The USA is the world's largest consumer of coffee, importing 16 to 20 million bags annually (2.5 million pounds), representing 1/3 of all coffee exported. More than half of the United States population consumes coffee typically drinking 3.4 cups of coffee a day.
• The first European coffee was sold in pharmacies in 1615 as a medicinal remedy.
• Cappuccino is so named because of the drink's peak of foam which resembles the cowl of a Capuchin friar's habit.
• Flavoured coffees are created after the roasting process by applying flavoured oils specially created to use on coffee beans.
• Espresso contains less caffeine than any other roast.
• Coffee was first known in Europe as Arabian Wine.
• Bach wrote a coffee cantata in 1732.
• The US Navy used to serve alcoholic beverages on board ships. However when Admiral Josephus "Joe" Daniels became Chief of Naval Operations, he outlawed alcohol on board ships, except for very special occasions. Coffee then became the drink of choice, hence the term "Cup of Joe".
• The heavy tax on tea imposed in 1773 on the colonies that resulted in the "Boston Tea Party" resulted in America switching from mainly drinking tea to coffee. To drink coffee was an expression of freedom.
• Italians do not drink espresso during meals. It is considered to be a separate event and is given its own time.
• In Greece and Turkey, the oldest person is almost always served their coffee first.
• In the ancient Arab world, coffee became such a staple part of family life that one of the causes allowed by law for marital separation was a husband's refusal to produce coffee for his wife.
• Raw coffee beans, soaked in water and spices, are chewed like candy in many parts of Africa .
• Coffee represents three-quarters of all the caffeine consumed in the USA .
• For reducing wrinkes and improving their skin, the Japanese have been known to bathe in coffee grounds fermented with pineapple pulp.
• Citrus flavours have been added to coffee for several hundred years.
• The Europeans first added chocolate to their coffee in the 1600's.
• Our sense of smell, more than any of our other senses, makes our final judgement on coffee.
• With alcohol forbidden by the Koran in the early 1400's coffee soon became the replacement drink.
• The French philosopher, Voltaire, reportedly drank fifty cups of coffee a day.
• Decaffeinated coffee sales are at their highest in January due to people's New Year resolutions.
• Scandinavia has the world's highest per capita annual coffee consumption, 26.4 pounds.
• The Arabs flavoured their coffee with spices during the brewing process.
• Iced coffee in a can has been popular in Japan since 1945.
• The human body will absorb just 300 milligrams of caffeine at a given time. Additional amounts are cast off and provide no additional stimulation. The human body dissipates 20% of the caffeine in it's system per hour.
• Wild medical contraptions used to exist to administer a mixture of coffee and an assortment of heated butter, honey and oil to treat the sick.
• Regular coffee drinkers have about 1/3 less asthma symptoms than those of non-coffee drinkers according to a Harvard researcher who studied 20,000 people.
• Australians consume 60% more coffee than tea, a sixfold increase since 1940.
• Turkish law makes it legal for a woman to divorce her husband if he fails to provide her with her daily quota of coffee.
• Coffee consumption per capita (in kgs) in 1997:

Classic Quotes:

"Ah! How sweet coffee tastes! Lovelier than a thousand kisses, sweeter far than muscatel wine!"
From J.S. Bach's "Coffee Cantata," 1732  

"Coffee is the common man's gold, and like gold, it brings to every person the feeling of luxury and nobility." Sheik Abd-al-Kadir, In Praise of Coffee, 1587
For all coffee connoisseurs, this is a full text which is deserving of a good read.

"Another head - and a black alpaca jacket and a serviette this time - to tell us coffee is ready. Not before it is time, too." D. H. Lawrence, Sea  and Sardinia.

"Give a frontiersman coffee and tobacco, and he will endure any privation, suffer any hardship, but let him be without these two necessaries of the woods, and he becomes irresolute and murmuring." U.S. Army Lt. William Whiting in 1849

"Coffee is real good when you drink it it gives you time to think. It's a lot more than just a drink; it's something happening. Not as in hip, but like an event, a place to be, but not like a location, but like somewhere within yourself. It gives you time, but not actual hours or minutes, but a chance to be, like be yourself, and have a second cup. " Gertrude Stein

"Last comes the beverage of the Orient shore,
Mocha, far off, the fragrant berries bore.
Taste the dark fluid with a dainty lip,
Digestion waits on pleasure as you sip."
Pope Leo XII

"A very good drink they call Chaube that is almost as black as ink and very good in illness, especially of the stomach. This they drink in the morning early in the open places before everybody, without any fear or regard, out of clay or China cups, as hot as they can, sipping it a little at a time."
German physician and botanist Leonhard Rauwolf in 1582.

"The little campfires, rapidly increasing to hundreds in number, would shoot up along the hills and plains, and as if by magic, acres of territory would be illuminous with them. Soon they would be surrounded by the soldiers, who made it an inevitable rule to cook their coffee first."
John D. Bilings, a Union veteran, in his book, Hardtack and Coffee.

"It is extraordinary how the house and the simplest possessions of someone who has been left become so quickly sordid. Even the stain on the coffee cup seems not coffee but the physical manifestation of one's inner stain, the fatal blot that from the beginning had marked one for ultimate aloneness."  Coleman Dowell

"Only Irish coffee provides in a single glass all four essential food groups: alcohol, caffeine, sugar, and fat." Alex Levine

"Strong coffee, much strong coffee, is what awakens me. Coffee gives me warmth, waking, an unusual force and a pain that is not without very great pleasure."
Napoleon Bonaparte

"I would rather suffer with coffee than be senseless." Napoleon Bonaparte

"The ability to deal with people is as purchasable a commodity as sugar or coffee. And I pay more for that ability than for any other under the sun." John D. Rockefeller, Jr.

"I do much of my creative thinking while golfing. If people know you're working at home they think nothing of walking in for a cup of coffee, but wouldn't dream of interrupting on the golf course." Harper Lee

"If you want to improve your understanding, drink coffee; it is the intelligent beverage."
Sydney Smith

"Wine is for aging, not coffee."
Ken Hutchinson, Starsky and Hutch

"I have measured out my life with coffee spoons."
T. S. Elliot

"After a few months' acquaintance with European 'coffee' one's mind weakens, and his faith with it, and he begins to wonder if the rich beverage of home, with it's clotted layer of yellow cream on top of it, is not a mere dream after all, and a thing which never existed." Mark Twain, in A Tramp Abroad.

"The morning cup of coffee has an exhilaration about it which the cheering influence of the afternoon or evening cup of tea cannot be expected to reproduce." Oliver Wendall Holmes, Sr.

Nancy Astor (to Winston Churchill) :
"If I were your wife, I would put poison in your coffee."
Winston Churchill (in reply) :
"And if I were your husband, I would drink it."

"It's just like when you've got some coffee that's too black, which means it's too strong. What do you do? You integrate it with cream, you make it weak. But if you pour too much cream in it, you won't even know you ever had coffee. It used to be hot, it becomes cool. It used to be strong, it becomes weak. It used to wake you up, now it puts you to sleep."
Malcolm X, 196, Message to the Grass Roots

"Make my coffee like I like my men: hot, black, and strong."
Willona Wood, Good Times

"Never drink black coffee at lunch; it will keep you awake in the afternoon."
Jilly Cooper, 1970, How to Survive from Nine to Five

"Resolve to free yourselves from the slavery of the tea and coffee and other slop-kettle."
William Cobbett, 1829, Advise to Young Men

"Tobacco, coffee, alcohol, hashish, prussic acid, strichnine, are weak dilutions: the surest poison is time."
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Society and Solitude: Old Age

"Coffee, according to the women of Denmark , is to the body what the Word of the Lord is to the soul."
Isak Dinesen, 1934, author of "Out of Africa"

"Coffee: we can get it anywhere, and get as loaded as we like on it, until such teeth-chattering, eye-bulging, nonsense-gibbering time as we may be classified unable to operate heavy machinery."
Joan Frank, 1991

"Many people are like instant coffee: the minute they get in hot water they dissolve." Anonymous, from Toronto Globe and Mail; July 10, 1993 .

"The discovery of coffee has enlarged the realm of illusion and given more promise to hope."   Isidore Bourdon

"The powers of a man's mind are directly proportional to the quantity of coffee he drank." Sir James MacKintosh  - 18th century philosopher

"If it wasn't for coffee, I'd have no discernible personality at all."
David Letterman Esquire Interview Fall '94

"Ah! How sweet coffee tastes! Lovlier than a thousand kisses, sweeter than muscatel wine! I must have my coffee..."  Johann Sebastian Bach (1732, an aria from his 'Kaffee-Kantate')

"You make good coffee . . . You're a slob, but you make good coffee. Cher in "Moonstruck"

"See how special you are? I serve you coffee in the parlor." From "The Black Orchid"Anthony Quinn to Sophia Loren.

"Why don't you have a cup of coffee at least? I, um, I'm a little low in sugar and I don't have any cream, but it's real coffee." Barbara Streisand to Robert Redford in "The Way We Were"

"I never laugh until I've had my coffee." Clark Gable to Carole Lombard in the only movie they did together, "No Man of Her Own"

"What is this demilitarized zone? Whatever it is, I like it! Gets you on your toes better than a strong cup of cappuccino." Robin Williams in "Good Morning Vietnam "

"Thank you for your coffee, seignor. I shall miss that when we leave Casablanca ." Ingrid Bergman in " Casablanca "

"The first cup is for the guest, the second for enjoyment, the third for the sword."
An old Arabic saying.

"The vacuum pot is truly the CD player of coffeemakers; all you taste is the coffee." Corby Kummer, food expert.

"Compared to Clinton, I feel like a loser. I can't even get the intern to make me coffee!" Heard on David Letterman show on 21 Aug 99

"Decaffeinated Coffee. It's useless warm brown water." Again! Heard on David Letterman show on March 2000

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