coffee as a magic substance

So think about it. Humankind has had a relationship with coffee for approximately 2,000 years. It takes a pretty special plant to get that kind of attention for that long. this plant has magic. It does good things for us two-leggeds. If that first lunatic fringe goat herder hadn't decided to find out what was making his goat dance, we wouldn't have had the Renaissance. Paris wouldn't have been founded. The Mongol Horde would have over-run Europe. They would not have stopped at the gates of Vienna. The United States never would have been founded. Lloyd's of London never would have existed. The Dutch never would have found cocoa.

That, my friends, is genuine magic.

From Cleveland Coffee Guru Carl Jones:

The Muslims banned alcohol and but allowed coffee drinking because it stimulated the brain and aided in prayer. It kept sleep away. Eventually, it was from Islam that the knowledge of the Renaissance came, from Moorish Spain. They brought mathematics and the ideas of Aristotle and Plato whose writing had been preserved by the Muslims. When the Europeans were living like pigs, the Moors had running water and and they had built the great cities of Spain and Syria, Damascus, Baghdad. They had sewers and the Europeans were living with the Black Death because they didn't know how to keep themselves clean.

So we owe a lot to coffee. Drink up.