1.WHO DRINKS THE MOST?
The country where most coffee is consumed is Finland, with 12 kg per capita per year. While the one where you consume less is Puerto Rico, with 400 grams of coffee for each person.
Italy is only in twelfth place, with 5.9 kg of coffee per capita, after Switzerland, Canada, Denmark, Austria, etc The average world consumption is 1.3 kg per person per year.
2.IT CAN BE POISONOUS.
Caffeine can kill you.
But you have to drink between 80 and 100 cups of coffee in a short time (about 4 hours).
3.IT’S NOT JUST CAFFEINE.
There’s at least 1,000 chemicals in the coffee. Some of them are a continuous source of discovery for science and could be used in the future to cure heart disease and insomnia. The WHO recently exonerated coffee from suspicions of past decades that labelled the drink as containing carcinogenic compounds.
4. THE BEST TIME TO DRINK COFFEE? SCIENCE TELLS YOU.
Is every moment right? Not really. Almost all of us know that having an espresso in the late afternoon can keep our eyes open when we go to sleep. But in the rest of the day, what is the ideal time to take caffeine?
From 9:30 to 11:30 in the morning every moment is the right moment, according to neuroscience and chrono-pharmacology, a branch of medicine that links the intake of drugs or psychoactive substances with the course of our natural biological clock.
5.IT’S A MEDICINE.
A 2008 study by the University of Lund in Sweden showed that drinking coffee would reduce the risk of breast cancer, at least for women who have a relatively common variant of the CYP1A2 gene, which helps metabolise estrogen and coffee.
And in 2011, the Harvard School of Public Health reported a study of 48,000 men, who drinking six or more cups a day of coffee reduced the risk of prostate cancer by 60%.
The latest news in order of time signals the power of coffee as “antidepressant”: according to the Harvard School of Public Health, People who consume 2 to 4 cups of coffee a day have a 50% less chance of taking their own lives than others.
6. IT’S CALLED LIKE THIS BECAUSE
Around the year 1000 Arab traders brought coffee beans from their travels to Africa from which they drew an exciting drink for boiling that they called qahwa (“exciting”). From here to the Turkish word kahve and Italian coffee the step was short. But there are those who claim that the name actually comes from a caffa, a region of Ethiopia where it grows spontaneously.
The coffee spread in Europe only in the seventeenth century with the provisional name of “Arabian Wine”, thanks to the usual Venetian merchants, at home in Istanbul (capital of the Ottoman Empire).
Branded by the Church as“drink of the devil”, for its exciting properties, was for years (prepared“Turkish”, dissolved in water) a tavern drink. At least until the dawn of the ’700, when the coffee became meeting places frequented by enlightened philosophers.
7.NOT ALL… DRINK IT.
Prince Charles of England, passionate about alternative medical therapies, is a fervent supporter of coffee enemas as an anti-cancer cure
(are part of the so-called Gerson cure which includes vitamin injections, ed.). Amazon sells the kit to make them themselves.
8. LIKE TO ARTISTS.
The composer Johann Sebastian Bach liked coffee so much to dedicate a song to him: the Kaffeekantate, performed in Leipzig, Germany, between 1732 and 1735.
9.AND TO THE SPORTSMEN.
According to a study by the University of Queensland, published in the Journal of Science and Medicine in Sport, 14 cyclists who had taken coffee an hour before a race earned 2% in terms of speed.
10.WHY IS WHAT YOU DRINK IN SOME PLACES STRONGER?
It depends partly on the mixture. The two main types of coffee, the robust and the Arabica do not have the same organoleptic characteristics. The robust can have twice the caffeine of the arabica (which is more valuable, but less “strong”). And partly depends on the roasting (or roasting) of the coffee, the roasting process.
11.THE DECAF… IT’S NOT ENTIRELY.
There is only one variation of decaf coffee of course: the Charrierian coffee, originally from Cameroon. The rest of the coffee is decaffeinated artificially. But in reality it is impossible to completely eliminate caffeine. According to a study by the University of Florida, 5/10 cups of decaf coffee would contain the same amount of caffeine as one to two cups of coffee. So on average in a cup of decaf there would be the equivalent of one fifth or one tenth of that in a cup of regular espresso.
12.WHAT IS THE BEST SYSTEM TO DO IT?
Before the invention of mocha coffee, in our country coffee was usually made with Neapolitan coffee makers. These devices, still widespread in some parts of southern Italy, consist of two containers placed one on top of the other and separated by a filter filled with coffee. When the water in the lower cylinder boils, the coffee pot is removed from the fire and turned over. Thus the water, by gravity, passes through the ground coffee and extracts its aromas and essences. In the Moka the extraction process is similar, but faster. In fact it is the overheated steam that quickly pushes the boiling water through the filter. So, in less than a minute, the coffee is extracted and poured into the top.
What is the best system? That“Neapolitan”, because filtering is slower and the aroma of coffee is less altered by contact with the overheated water.
