Etyma

Image Courtesy Coffee Break USA

Exploring the roots of coffee led me to a verdure of metadata. Weeding out the tedious details, here are some fulgurant facts:

• Dissemination: Coffee drinking began in 15th-century Arabia. It reached Europe by the mid 17th century and immediately became hugely popular. 
  
• 19th Century Brew: One 1844 cookbook instructed people to use a much higher coffee/water ratio than we favor today (one tablespoon per sixteen ounces); boil the brew for almost a half an hour (today people are instructed never to boil coffee); and add fish skin, isinglass (a gelatin made from the air bladders of fish), or egg shells to reduce the acidity brought out by boiling the beans so long (today we would discard overly acidic coffee). Coffee yielded from this recipe would strike modern coffee lovers as intolerably strong and acidic; moreover, it would have little aroma.
• Caffeine Content: a six-ounce (2.72 kilograms) cup of coffee contains 100 milligrams of caffeine, more than comparable amounts of tea (50 milligrams), cola (25 milligrams), or cocoa (15 milligrams).
• Addiction: Coffee is now consumed by about one-third of the world's population. 85 per cent Americans begin their day by making some form of the drink, and the average American will consume three cups of it over the course of the day.  

Info courtesy Answers.com