Out of Kilter – By Ken Carpenter

Every morning as I enjoy my first cup of coffee, I take a few seconds to bless the goats. Well, I did it once anyway.

Around 800-850 A.D. an Ethiopian goat herder named Kaldi (maybe, but I doubt it) noticed that his goats were getting frantically frisky, dancing like a pack of whirling dervishes.

“By the flea-infested beard of my sainted grandmother,” he grumbled, “Those goats are wired to the gills!”

Upon investigation, he discovered that the goats were dining on berries from the supposedly useless coffee shrubs dotting the landscape. Figuring that a little extra energy can come in handy for chasing hasty goats, it was not long before the world’s first pot of coffee was simmering over a dried camel dung fire. The rest is history.

Coffee’s reputation had a few blemishes on it in ancient times. Mecca outlawed it in 1511 because they were sure that it stimulated radical thinking. Some Italian clergyman in the 16th century believed it was “satanic”, but coffee loving Pope Clement VII quashed the ban they wanted.

It was also outlawed in the 17th century by Charles II of England to help quell a rebellion and by Fredrick the Great in Germany who worried about too much money leaving the country.

Most amazing to me was when the Swedish government made coffee and the cups and saucers it required illegal in the18th century. They, like the coffee haters before them, thought it had ties to rebellious sentiment.

If you see any beady-eyed whisperers at Starbucks, you can come to your own conclusion about the legitimacy of the coffee insurgent suspicions in the past. Don’t stare at them though, you are sure to get the evil eye, and it could be damaging.

Speaking of Starbucks, they now rob poor coffee lovers at over 29,000 locations around the globe. What they charge does seem like a crime, but it is mighty tasty.

Brazil grows about a third of the world’s coffee, twice as much as second place Vietnam. That pretty much explains why all the film of Rio de Janeiro shows people dancing in the streets.

Americans now consume 400 million cups of coffee every day. That sounds quite impressive, but Finland is the world’s coffee guzzling champ. The average adult Finn goes through 27.5 pounds of coffee per year. Compare that to the pitiful 11 pounds the average American adult uses per year.

I never thought I’d feel like a big sissy for only drinking two cups a day. Guess I should pout for a while.

President Theodore Roosevelt was such a coffee addict that one of his sons described his custom cup as “more in the nature of a bathtub.”

Come to think of it, his skin always looked a bit gnarly. Maybe he bathed in it too.

The Guiness World Record for the largest cup of coffee ever was nine feet tall and held 3,487 gallons. It was made in Honduras, and they must have some heavy-duty mud swiggers down there if they polished it off.

Where’s Teddy when you need him?

The two most expensive coffees in the world are made from picking undigested coffee beans (or pits or seeds, whatever) from animal poop. They lounge in the gut long enough for stomach enzymes to supposedly add a prized aroma and flavor. Prized is the key word there, for both can cost $600 per pound in some parts of the world.

Gag me with a toilet plunger!

Black Ivory coffee is made from digging through elephant dung. Some five-star hotels sell it for $50 a cup.

The other is Kopi Iuwak, called Vietnamese weasel coffee. It is collected from the poop of civets, a weaselly, cat type creature. You can get a really good deal for it on eBay, only $3,500 for 33 pounds.

What a deal! I think I’ll stick with Folgers for now though.

When I was a kid, I was flabbergasted at the amount of coffee my older relatives would put away at family gatherings. They drank it all day, every day, and were still swilling it when the youngsters were sent off to bed. For all I know, they never slept, for it seemed like they were still in the same positions the next morning, steaming cups by their side.

If I drank that much in a day, I wouldn’t sleep either. In fact, I could become the next superhero, The Stupendous Vibrating Man. Problem is, I wouldn’t be super or a hero, I’d just vibrate until the villains went nuts and shot themselves.

Or me, more like it.

Coffee is funny. In the past when I needed a caffeine buzz, I would search out a cup of dark roast. I like the taste better, but it turns out that mild or regular roast has more caffeine in it than dark. The extra roasting cooks out some of the caffeine.

Remind me not to roast myself.

The term “Cup of Joe” came about when Admiral Josephus Daniels outlawed alcohol on U.S. Navy ships. The disappointed rum drinkers had to change their drink of choice, and I guess a “Cup of Josephus” just didn’t have a ring to it.

Coffee is reputed to lower the risk of colon cancer, gallstones, cirrhosis of the liver, Parkinson’s disease, and the suicide rate of female nurses (I did not make that up!). Some researchers also swear it can make you live longer.

I don’t know if coffee can actually make you smarter or if you just seem that way when you perk up.

Personal research has convinced me that some folks could lose a battle of wits with a bowling ball if the ball challenged them before they have their morning coffee.

Then too, I think we all know a few humans who could lose that fight even with a pot of coffee under their belt.

They might not realize it though, for realizing is not their strength.