Although this is a very health conscious generation - we are even more addicted to coffee then any generation before us: soda drinks with caffeine, water with caffeine, energizer drinks with caffeine, the normal cokes and Pepsis, latte’s and cappuccinos.

Plus we pour huge amounts of sugar, sweetener and also milk into these drinks (maybe not into a cold coke) - not very healthy either. It’s a mad generation Starbucks and Diet Coke rolled into one big global addiction. You find no country without coffee shops and cooled coke dispensers. There is even a Mecca Cola.

You have to turn to Mecca before you take a sip.

Here are the basics about coffee from Wikipedia:

Coffee is a beverage, usually hot, prepared from the roasted seeds of the coffee plant. These seeds are usually called coffee beans, although they are not technically beans. Coffee is the second most commonly traded commodity in the world, trailing only petroleum. A total of 6.7 million tonnes of coffee were produced annually in 1998-2000, forecast to rise to 7 million tonnes annually by 2010 FAO figures. Coffee is one of humanity’s chief sources of caffeine, a stimulant. Its potential benefits and hazards have been, and continue to be, widely studied and discussed.

The word entered English in 1598 via Italian caffè, via Turkish kahve, from Arabic qahwa. Its ultimate origin is uncertain, there being several legendary accounts of the origin of the drink. One possible origin is the Kaffa region in Ethiopia, where the plant originated (its native name there being bunna). Coffee beans were first exported from Ethiopia to Yemen. One legendary account (though certainly a myth) is that of the Yemenite Sufi mystic named Shaikh ash-Shadhili. When traveling in Ethiopia he observed goats of unusual vitality and, upon trying the berries that the goats had been eating, experienced the same effect. A similar myth ascribes the discovery to an Ethiopian goatherd named Kaldi. Qahwa originally referred to a type of wine, and need not be the name of the Kaffa region.

Consumption of coffee was outlawed in Mecca in 1511 and in Cairo in 1532, but in the face of its immense popularity, the decree was later rescinded. In 1554, the first coffeehouse in Istanbul opened.

Largely through the efforts of the British and Dutch East India companies, coffee became available in Europe no later than the 16th century, according to Leonhard Rauwolf’s 1583 account. The first coffeehouse in England was set up in Oxford by one Jacob or Jacobs, a Turkish Jew, in 1650. The first coffeehouse in London was opened two years later in St. Michael’s Alley in Cornhill. The proprietor was Pasqua Rosée, the Ragusan servant of a trader in Turkish goods named Daniel Edwards, who imported the coffee and assisted Rosée in setting up the establishment. The coffeehouse spread rapidly in Europe and America after that, with first coffeehouses opening in Boston in 1670, and in Paris in 1671. By 1675, there were more than 3,000 coffeehouses in England.

The British actually love coffee as much as tea.

Women were not allowed in coffeehouses, and in London, the anonymous 1674 “Women’s Petition Against Coffee” complained:

“…the Excessive Use of that Newfangled, Abominable, Heathenish Liquor called COFFEE […] has […] Eunucht our Husbands, and Crippled our more kind Gallants, that they are become as Impotent, as Age. “

Legend has it that the first coffeehouse opened in Vienna in 1683 after the Battle of Vienna, taking its supplies from the spoils left behind by the defeated Turks. The officer who received the coffee beans, Polish military officer Franciszek Jerzy Kulczycki, opened the first coffee house in Vienna and helped popularize the custom of adding sugar and milk to the coffee. Another more credible story is that the first coffeehouses were opened in Krakow in the 16th or 17th century because of closer trade ties with the East, most notably the Turks.

Turks at the Gates of Vienna: We are only here to deliver the coffee!

The first coffee plantation in the New World was established in Brazil in 1727, and this country, like most others cultivating coffee as a commercial commodity, relied heavily on slave labor from Africa for its viability until abolition in 1888. The success of coffee in 17th-century Europe was paralleled with the spread of the habit of tobacco smoking all over the continent during the course of the Thirty Years War (1618– 48).

One brand to rule them all - and with dark brew to bind them …

For many decades in the 19th and early 20th centuries Brazil was the biggest producer and virtual monopolist in the trade, until a policy of maintaining high prices opened opportunities to other growers, like Colombia, Guatemala and Indonesia. The mother plant for much of the arabica coffee in the world is kept in the Amsterdam Hortus Botanicus.

After so many dry facts I need a coffee myself!