1 October marks International Coffee Day! Today coffee associations, experts and connoisseurs around the world honour the men and women who work with the humble coffee bean – whether it’s farming it, roasting or brewing it.

To celebrate, we’ve put together a cupful of facts that you probably did not know about one of the world’s favourite beverages.

Ethiopian Shepards discovered coffee

According to legend, Ethiopian shepherds discovered coffee around 800AD after seeing goats dancing merrily after eating coffee beans.

Instant Coffee was patented in the USA in 1910

Instant coffee was first seen in England in 1771 but it was not mass-produced until it appeared, and was patented, in the USA in 1910.

The country who consumes the most coffee is Finland

The British drink about 95 million cups of coffee a day. The top coffee-drinking nation is Finland. According to the International Coffee Association, each Finn consumes 12 kilograms of coffee per year. This makes Finland the second-largest country in the world for per capita coffee consumption.

Coffee is actually a seed

We call it a bean because its resemblance to beans. It is the pit inside the red or purple fruit often referred to as a cherry. Just like ordinary cherries, the coffee fruit is also a so-called stone fruit.

German Composer Johann Christian Bach wrote a song about coffee

JS Bach wrote a comic Coffee Cantata in praise of the joys of the drink. The short comic opera was written (circa 1735) for a musical ensemble called The Collegium Musicum based in a storied Zimmerman’s coffee house in Leipzig, Germany. The whole cantata seems very much to have been written with the local audience in mind.

Learn how to brew the perfect cup without filters.