An Assortment of Trivia for the Coffee Curious

More interesting factoids lifted from Gourmet-Coffee-Zone.com: In Japan, there exist over 10,000 coffee cafes in just Tokyo alone. These cafes are called "Kissaten" by their denizens. Japan is the third-highest consumer of coffee in the world, according to this site, after the United States and Brazil.

Brazil is the largest producer of coffee in the world today. Much of this coffee is not eco-friendly, however, and is produced in large commercial operations. In 2006, 44 million bags of coffee were harvested from four billion coffee trees. Twenty-seven million bags were exported to other countries for trade.

An acre of coffee trees can produce on average as much as 10,000 pounds of coffee cherries. Each cherry from this acre of trees contains two coffee beans, yielding approximately 2000 pounds of beans after processing, and 400 pounds of coffee beans after roasting.

Generally regarded as the largest retail coffee chain in the world, Starbucks actually sells more milk by volume than coffee. Some believe that the reason for this rests upon Starbucks' reputation for producing strong, bold, dark roasted coffee, reflecting a customer tendency to tone down the perhaps "over-roasted" coffee.

In the 1950s, the average price of coffee in North America was ten cents, with some places still selling it at five cents. And that included refills. In the 1650s, a cup of coffee could be had in England for a penny, leading some to refer to the coffee shops prevalent in that day as "penny universities."