I start most mornings with two or three cups of coffee, like millions of people around the world. It's something I don't believe I could do without for very long - and until I went looking, I had no idea how little I actually knew about it.
I'm no expert. But I found seven things about this ordinary drink that turned out to be genuinely surprising - and I wrote them down. Like: the goatherd everyone credits with discovering coffee almost certainly never existed. Or that coffee lost to tea in England for reasons that had nothing to do with taste. Or that the coffee break you take for granted was a marketing campaign before it was a habit. This short book covers all of it - plus a bonus chapter on why decaf is younger than you'd guess, and how a German patent, a world war, and a very good, very unproven seawater story all got tangled up in your evening cup.
Seven Things You Should Know About Coffee is part of the I'm No Expert, But series - short, accurate, curious books for people who'd rather know seven true things about a subject than pretend to be an expert in it. Each one takes about thirty to forty-five minutes to read.
- Where the Kaldi legend actually comes from - and doesn't
- How a king's failed ban on coffeehouses shaped London's coffee culture
- Why coffee, not tea, became the drink of the American Revolution
- What actually separates a "strong" cup from a caffeinated one
- How coffee spread across empires, one stolen or smuggled plant at a time
- Why the health verdict on coffee keeps flipping - and what the evidence really shows today
- How coffee got a personality: rations, breaks, third places, and a seasonal latte
Jim Stovall is a former journalism professor and author of a top-selling writing textbook, along with several other books of history and journalism. He is the author of the I'm No Expert, But series, in which he investigates topics he knows little about - coffee, beekeeping, and more - and reports back on what he finds. He gets up too early most mornings, drinks two or three cups of coffee, listens to Baroque music, and tries to read as little news as he can get away with. He is a native of Nashville, Tennessee.
