Know Your Joe: 5 Things You Didn’t Know About Coffee

First things first—although widely called “coffee beans,” the part of the plant that is roasted and ground to make your morning (or afternoon, or evening, or snacktime) cup is actually a seed. It is the pit of a red fruit called a coffee cherry. (Technically the word “bean” only refers to the seeds of plants in the family Fabaceae.)

Legend has it that a goatherd first discovered coffee when his goats ate some coffee cherries and went a bit wild with the caffeine high. Whether or not that story has roots in fact, coffee was originally consumed by humans as a food rather than a drink. Early African tribes would mix the coffee fruit and seeds with animal fat to make a sort of energy snack.

The world’s most expensive coffee is a type called kopi luwak. Originally from Indonesia, this…unique…type of coffee is harvested after being digested and excreted by the Asian palm civet, a small catlike mammal. Put more bluntly, it’s poop coffee. Apparently the digestion process gives the coffee a complex, rounded taste, and consumers are willing to pay $50 or more per cup.

The world’s first webcam was created to keep tabs on a pot of coffee. Namely, the pot of coffee in the “Trojan room” computer lab at the University of Cambridge. People working at the lab could access real-time images of the pot to know whether or not they could get their caffeine on. A few years after its internal debut, the pot achieved international celebrity when its images were made accessible via the internet. The Trojan room coffee webcam was online for ten years, from 1991-2001, and was viewed by millions from all around the world.

A good cup of joe really brings the world together. Coffee is the second most traded commodity on Earth. So what’s the first? Oil. Luckily coffee doesn’t cause as much commotion as its fellow go-juice. If only we could get it to power our cars! (That’s been attempted, with some success. But who would waste all that delicious coffee?)