Dancing goats and a London insurance market
A legend says that coffee was discovered in Ethiopia by a goatherd called Kaldi, who noticed his goats dancing about after eating red berries from a bush. The story was first written down in 1671, centuries after the event it describes. What is certain is that by the 1400s Sufi monks in Yemen were drinking COFFEE to stay awake through night-time prayers, and that coffee houses spread from there to Cairo, Istanbul and, in 1652, London. Coffee from the Yemeni port of Mocha gave its name to the MOCHA.
London's coffee houses were nicknamed penny universities, because for the price of a cup you could listen to the news and the arguments. Edward Lloyd's coffee house, opened in the 1680s, became the place where shipowners and merchants met to insure ships, and grew into Lloyd's of London, still one of the world's biggest insurance markets.
Every tea comes from one plant
Chinese legend says that tea was discovered nearly 5,000 years ago when leaves blew into a pot of water being boiled for the emperor Shen Nong. Whatever the truth, green, black, white and oolong tea all come from the same plant, a kind of camellia. The difference is how the leaves are treated after picking. For GREEN TEA they are heated quickly to stop them changing; for black tea they are left to react with the air and darken first. HERBAL drinks such as peppermint and camomile contain no tea at all.
CHAI simply means tea, from the Chinese word cha, and in India masala chai is black tea boiled with milk and spices. EARL GREY is black tea flavoured with oil from the bergamot orange, named after Charles Grey, the second Earl Grey, British Prime Minister in the 1830s. MATCHA is green tea ground into powder and whisked into hot water, the drink at the heart of the Japanese tea ceremony that our samurai page mentions.
Monks' robes and a milky argument
A CAPPUCCINO is named after the Capuchin friars, whose brown robes are about the colour of espresso mixed with milk. MACCHIATO means stained, because the ESPRESSO is marked with a spoonful of foam, and LATTE is simply the Italian for milk. The AMERICANO, espresso with extra hot water, is said to have been made for American soldiers in Italy during the Second World War who found espresso too strong. The FLAT WHITE is claimed by both Australia and New Zealand, which have been arguing over it since the 1980s.
Chocolate houses and the kettle surge
The Aztecs drank chocolate cold, bitter, frothy and spiced with chilli. In Europe, sugar was added and it was served hot. In the late 1600s London had chocolate houses as well as coffee houses; White's, one of the city's oldest private clubs, began as one in 1693. Hot CHOCOLATE made from COCOA powder has been a winter comfort ever since, as has MULLED wine or cider warmed with spices.
In Britain, the KETTLE is a problem for the electricity grid. When millions of people switch one on at once during the adverts or at half-time in a big football match, demand jumps suddenly, and engineers at the National Grid watch the television schedule so extra power is ready. The biggest surge on record came after the England football team's World Cup semi-final in 1990. Our energy page covers how power stations keep up.