coffee trivia

• It takes four to six years for a coffee tree to produce its first coffee cherries containing the beans.
• 4000 coffee beans go into every pound of ground coffee.
• The word 'coffee' comes from words used both in Arabic - 'kahweh', meaning ‘invigorating’ – and in Turkish – ‘kahveh’ meaning that which gives strength or vigour.
• By the 10th century, coffee was being widely drunk in Persia and throughout the Muslim world by the 15th century.
• In 1453, Turkish law made it legal for a woman to divorce her husband if he failed to provide her daily coffee quota.
• Coffee reached Europe early in the 17th century. Louis XIV and Pope Clement VIII were early converts.
• The first coffee-house in England opened in Oxford, in 1650, and in London one year later. By 1700, there were some 2000 coffee-houses in the capital.
• The first known advertisement for coffee dates from 1652.
• The Dutch began growing coffee on the island of Java, now part of Indonesia, in 1696.
• In 1720, Gabriel Mathieu de Clieu, a French naval officer on leave in Paris, stole a cutting from the King's coffee tree in the Jardin des Plantes. He took it to Martinique. 50 years later, this Caribbean island had an estimated 18 million coffee trees.
• London's 17th century coffee-houses were known as 'Penny Universities' where it was possible to converse with artists, merchants and poets for the price of a coffee. In 1676, Charles II attempted to close them down, as hotbeds of political intrigue.
• Bach composed the Coffee Cantata in honour of the drink.
• By 1800, Brazil was the world’s largest coffee producer.
• Honoré de Balzac, the father of French realism fuelled his novel writing with upwards of 60 cups of coffee a day.
• During World War II, NESCAFÉ became so popular that the entire production of its U.S. plant, about a million cases a year, was reserved for military use.