11 fascinating facts about coffee

Coffee’s part of most of our lives. However, the stuff inside that cup is certainly not ordinary, and there’s a lot more to that morning brew than just caffeine. Here are eleven fascinating facts about coffee that you may not know. Which of these facts interested you the most?

Featured Image Credit: Shutterstock.

Caffeine is in nectar

Caffeine isn’t just inside the coffee beans. Their flowers have it in the nectar, and that actually affects bees, as during experiments, bees that drank caffeinated nectar remembered floral scents about three times better than the control group. But the levels were low enough that the bees didn’t seem to find it bitter.

Paper filters change what’s in the cup

Switching between a French press & a drip machine actually changes more than flavor. Paper filters trap oily compounds called diterpenes, which stick to the fibers instead of going into your mug. However, unfiltered brews let them through. This is likely why they’ve been linked to higher LDL cholesterol in studies.

Coffee hydrates almost like water

People love to say that coffee dries you out, yet that’s not actually true in any meaningful way. Your body mostly treats it like water when you drink a few cups, although it can make you run to the bathroom a bit sooner. But it usually still counts toward daily hydration. Coffee drinkers handle it just fine.

Microbes shape flavor during processing

Tiny organisms work on the beans long before you ever even start roasting. As the sticky fruit breaks down, yeasts & bacteria move in and start transforming sugars & acids, which changes how the beans will taste later. Sometimes, it gives them fruity notes, sometimes, it’s something funkier. It all depends on who’s hanging around.

Some coffee species are naturally caffeine-free

Interestingly, a few coffee plants out there never bothered making caffeine, and one example is Coffea charrieriana. However, this isn’t the result of humans, as the plant simply evolved that way. But these plants are quite rare & mostly live in collections or the wild.

A tiny beetle beats caffeine using gut bacteria

Coffee plants developed caffeine partly as a defense. But one insect didn’t find that out. The coffee berry borer drills straight into the bean and can survive the caffeine, thanks to the microbes living in its gut. Those microbes break the compound down to give the beetle free access to the seed.

Coffee once traveled the world inside stolen seedlings

European powers once treated coffee plants like state secrets, and they controlled who could grow them. Moving a seedling overseas was a huge deal. But a French naval officer managed to sneak a live plant from Yemen to the Caribbean in the 1700s, apparently by using his own water supply to keep it alive through storms. That one plant changed coffee globally forever.

The world’s oldest known coffee plant is still alive

There’s a coffee tree in the Mankira forest in Ethiopia that’s known as the “mother coffee tree.” In fact, it’s believed to have been the very first coffee bean tree. To this day, it still flowers, and growers use its cuttings to keep its line going. There aren’t many plants with that kind of track record.

There’s a fungus that glows on coffee waste

Spent coffee grounds are good for compost, yes, but also for certain fungi. One of these is Panellus stipticus, which can grow on that material under the right moisture conditions, and when they do, it literally glows in the dark. Some labs actually use coffee waste for this because it’s cheap & easy to work with.

Used grounds carry enough oil for real biodiesel

That’s not all for old coffee grounds. They hold a surprising amount of oil, and you can extract that oil & turn it into biodiesel, which researchers have already tested on a larger scale using café waste. While the yields won’t power entire cities, they’re high enough that some places have looked at it as a local fuel option.

Coffee seeds can germinate after decades of dormancy

As long as you store them carefully, coffee seeds can stay alive far longer than most people expect. There have been documented germinations from seeds more than 30 years old that were kept in conservation vaults. Of course, they don’t always grow as quickly as fresh seeds.

The following sources were consulted in the preparation of this article: