FACTOIDS

- Coffee is the world's most widely taken legal drug.

- Only one cent of the price of a $2 cup of coffee goes to the grower.

- Coffee helped foster the slave trade.

- Coffee is the second-most-traded legal commodity on earth.

- In various times, coffee has been considered both an aphrodisiac and a sex inhibitor.

- 500 billion cups of coffee a years are consumer around the world, half of them at breakfast.

- Coffee provides a livelihood for 25 million people; 100 million more depend on it for survival.

- Coffee is a green bean hidden in the red cherry of the coffee tree.

- It is said the bean was discovered by the frisky goats of an Ethiopian goatherd called Kaldi.

- Coffee was roasted for the first time in the 1400s.

- Only the women of the house can roast the coffee beans in Ethiopia.

- Coffee traveled from Ethiopia to Arabia to Turkey and thence to Europe.

- The fertile seeds were smuggled to India, then Holland, then their colony Java.

- When Arabs tried to seize Vienna, a Pole warned the French who repulsed the Arabs, found the bags of coffee left behind, and the first European coffeehouse was opened.

- Coffee was perfected in Italy; even the Pope liked it.

- "The heart wants friend and coffee is only the excuse." –Turkish saying

- Cappuccinos name came from its resemblance to the colour and peak of the Capucin monk's cloak

- Espresso came from Neapolitan impatience; they couldn't wait for coffee to be brewed.

- Balzac is reputed to have drunk 40 cups of coffee a day.

- The first French café—Le Procope--was opened in 1686 by Italians.

- Cafés stimulated not only nervous systems but political and social ferment.

- By 1700, the English were big coffee drinkers.

- The Tatler started as a coffeehouse broadsheet, along with the institution of TIPS for service.

- The French Revolution was planned in coffeehouses.

- By 1790, half of all the coffee in the world was grown in Haiti by African slaves.

- One of the French king's mistresses gave a coffee plant to a French lieutenant she'd slept with; on the ocean voyage to Martinique he protected the plant from storms and pirates.From the single Martinique plant almost all the coffee in Latin America descends.

- The French established the slave-run plantations in the colonized islands

- In 1791 the slaves of Haiti rose up and destroyed the coffee and sugar plantations; the revolt lasted 12 years and defeated Napoleon's troops.

- Only 10% of the rainforest in Sao Paolo remains, with coffee-growing the dominant reason

- By 1816 there were 1 _ million slaves in Brazil, comprising 1/3 of the population, more than half of them working on coffee plantations from dawn to sunset, eating only once a day.

- The coffee crash in Brazil occurred only a few weeks before the 1929 economic crash.

- The scion of the Folger's coffee empire doesn't drink Folger's. He roasts and brews his own.

- The term "cup o' joe" originated in World War II.

- The coffee-break was an advertising ploy to sell more coffee.

- Brazilian president Vargas committed suicide over coffee politics.

- It costs a full day's wages for most coffee farmers to buy a cappuccino.

- Many coffee workers are only marginally better off than their enslaved ancestors.

- Most coffee farmers have never tasted their own coffee.

- Barristas are the bartenders of the speciality coffee industry