Coffee Stories · Fun Facts
10 fun facts about coffee you didn't know
Espresso means "pressed out", and other tidbits.
2 min read
Coffee trivia is the best kind of trivia: everyone at the table has a cup in hand while you share it. Here are ten facts worth stealing for your next brunch.
1. Coffee is technically a fruit. Beans are the seeds of a cherry-like berry. Before roasting, they are green and smell like grass, not coffee.
2. Finland drinks the most coffee per capita — roughly four cups a day per person on average, despite growing precisely zero beans. Norway, Iceland and Denmark round out a very caffeinated Nordic podium.
3. Decaf is not caffeine-free. A cup of decaf still carries 2 to 7 milligrams of caffeine, versus about 95 in a regular cup. Ten decafs is one real coffee in disguise.
4. An espresso shot has less caffeine than a mug of drip coffee — around 65 milligrams versus 95 or more. Espresso is concentrated, but the serving is tiny.
5. Beethoven counted exactly 60 beans for every cup he brewed. Composers: precise about everything.
6. The world's most expensive coffees have been through an animal. Kopi luwak passes through a civet cat; Black Ivory coffee, through an elephant. Curiosity aside, most experts will tell you a well-made Ethiopian natural tastes better for one percent of the price.
7. "Espresso" is Italian for "pressed out," describing how water is forced through the grounds — it has nothing to do with speed, despite the convenient pun.
8. Coffee was the first food to be freeze-dried at industrial scale, a technology accelerated by the need to supply soldiers in World War II.
9. Brazil has been the world's largest coffee producer for over 150 years straight, growing roughly a third of all coffee on Earth. In the 1932 Olympics, cash-strapped Brazil sent its athletes to Los Angeles on a ship loaded with coffee, sold along the way to fund the trip.
10. The webcam was invented because of coffee. In 1991, Cambridge University researchers pointed a camera at the shared coffee pot so they could check from their desks whether it was empty. The feed went online in 1993, making a humble coffee machine the star of the world's first webcam.
Bonus: legend says coffee was discovered by an Ethiopian goatherd whose goats would not stop dancing after eating the berries. Unverifiable — but after your third cup, entirely believable.