Interesting Coffee Facts
Thirty things about coffee that are true, which is more than can be said for most lists of coffee facts. Where a story is a legend, it says so.
Coffee attracts myths the way milk attracts coffee. This list sticks to things that are established, and flags the stories that are only stories.
The plant
- It is a fruit: coffee beans are the seeds of a red or yellow fruit called a coffee cherry. Each cherry usually holds two seeds, flat sides facing.
- Peaberries: in a small share of cherries only one seed develops, round instead of flat. Some roasters sell these separately.
- Two species run the market: Coffea arabica and Coffea canephora, sold as robusta. Arabica makes up the larger share of world production.
- Arabica is a hybrid: it arose naturally from a cross between canephora and another species, Coffea eugenioides, and unlike most coffee species it can pollinate itself.
- It comes from Ethiopia: arabica grows wild in the forests of south western Ethiopia, which is where it was domesticated.
- Caffeine is a defence: the plant uses it as a natural pesticide. Robusta carries roughly twice the caffeine of arabica, and grows at lower, hotter altitudes where pests are worse.
- Bees remember it: experiments have found that small doses of caffeine in nectar help bees remember a flower's scent, so they come back.
The history
- The goatherd is a legend: the story of Kaldi, who noticed his goats dancing after eating coffee cherries, was first written down centuries after the events it describes.
- Yemen came first: coffee was first drunk as a beverage in Yemen in the fifteenth century, by Sufis who used it to stay awake for night prayers.
- Mocha is a port: for two centuries much of the world's coffee left from al-Makha on the Red Sea, which is where the word mocha comes from.
- The word travelled: Arabic qahwa became Turkish kahve, Italian caffè and Dutch koffie, which gave English its coffee.
- Insurance began in a coffeehouse: Lloyd's of London grew out of Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse in the late seventeenth century, where ship owners and underwriters met.
- Coffee rust made Ceylon a tea island: a fungal disease wiped out the coffee plantations of Sri Lanka in the 1870s and 1880s, and planters switched to tea.
- Bach wrote a coffee comedy: his Coffee Cantata, from the 1730s, is about a young woman whose father wants her to give up coffee.
- The paper filter came from a kitchen: Melitta Bentz in Dresden patented a paper coffee filter in 1908, using blotting paper from her son's school book.
The inventions
- Espresso is an Italian patent: Luigi Bezzera patented an early espresso machine in Milan in 1901. The crema came later, with Achille Gaggia's lever machines in the late 1940s.
- Instant coffee is older than you think: a Japanese-American chemist, Satori Kato, showed a soluble coffee in 1901, and Nestlé launched Nescafé in 1938.
- Decaf began in Bremen: Ludwig Roselius developed the first commercial decaffeination process in the early 1900s and sold it as Kaffee HAG.
- The frappé was an accident: at the 1957 Thessaloniki fair a Nestlé representative shook instant coffee with cold water because he had no hot. See Greek frappé.
- Whipped coffee is old: Indian beaten coffee and the Cuban sugar espuma both predate the 2020 dalgona trend by decades.
The chemistry
- Roasting makes the flavour: green coffee tastes grassy and beany. Most of what we recognise as coffee is created in the roaster, by the Maillard reaction and caramelisation.
- Coffee has hundreds of aroma compounds: researchers have identified many hundreds of volatile compounds in roasted coffee, more than in most foods.
- Dark roast does not mean more caffeine: roasting changes caffeine very little. By weight, light and dark roasts are close; any difference is small next to the dose you use.
- Fresh coffee releases gas: roasted beans give off carbon dioxide for days afterwards, which is why bags have one-way valves and why fresh coffee blooms when wet.
- Cold brew is not dramatically less acidic: it tastes smoother, but research has found its pH is similar to hot coffee. See cold brew.
- Unfiltered coffee affects cholesterol: compounds called cafestol and kahweol, which paper filters mostly remove, can raise LDL cholesterol in people who drink a lot of unfiltered coffee.
The cup
- The Nordic countries drink the most: Finland usually tops the tables for coffee drunk per person.
- Brazil grows the most: it has been the world's largest producer for well over a century, followed by Vietnam, which grows mostly robusta.
- International Coffee Day is 1 October: the International Coffee Organization launched it in 2015.
- Ethiopia drinks its own: Ethiopia consumes about half of the coffee it grows, much of it through the coffee ceremony.
Myths that are not true
Coffee dehydrates you. Caffeine is a mild diuretic, but in regular drinkers a cup of coffee contributes to hydration rather than taking away from it.
Coffee stunts your growth. There is no good evidence for this.
Espresso has the most caffeine. A single espresso has less caffeine than a large mug of filter coffee. It is more concentrated, not larger. See caffeine by drink.
Sources
- Mark Pendergrast, Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World History of the coffee trade, coffeehouses and inventions.
- Poole et al., Coffee consumption and health, BMJ 2017 Effects of unfiltered coffee on cholesterol.