The world's favorite drug is caffeine.
"For
hundreds of years coffee was used in its raw form — astringent and
bitter — boiled or rolled with animal fat into a crude approximation of
energy pellets. People clearly were chomping the coffee berries for the
buzz, not the flavor. Yes, modern coffee tastes great. But it is 400
years of selective breeding and refinements in growing, harvesting,
roasting, and brewing that have taken it from its unappealing natural
state to the aromatic, smooth, flavorful beverage it has become. And
without the caffeine, nobody would have bothered with the plant in the
first place."
"Arabica coffee is the species native to the
mountains of Ethiopia, where it evolved with a blend of drenching rains,
abundant sun, and a narrow band of acceptable temperature. Arabica is
the smooth-flavored coffee
Americans have come to love, the coffee that gourmet coffee
connoisseurs swear by.
"The other common commercially grown
coffee species is Robusta, which is heartier and more productive and can
grow in warmer temperatures, out in the open at low elevation. Robusta
beans are often blended into commercial coffees, like Folgers. But
virtually all Colombian coffee is arabica."
"To brew Americans'
average fix of nearly three cups of coffee daily, America imported 3.5
billion pounds of coffee in 2012, more than any other nation. The coffee
Americans drink annually would fill more than 6,000 Olympic-size
swimming pools.
"If it's the flavor that makes us wild about
coffee, why did our grandparents drink twice as much coffee as we do
today? In those days the coffee was often roasted and ground long before
it was consumed. And then it was run though a percolator,
overextracting the bitter flavors. To most coffee lovers today, our
grandparents' coffee was pure percolated plonk. It tasted worse, and
they drank twice as much of it.
"For most of us, though, it's
likely that we are interested not so much in a flavor experience as in a
cup of coffee that is, more than anything, unobjectionable. If we
phrase the question a bit differently — asking not what makes a good cup
of coffee, but what makes a cup of coffee good — the answer is easy:
caffeine.
"But most of us know little about caffeine. Even the
most basic coffee distinction — between the robusta beans that become
cheap diner coffee and the arabica beans that supply chic coffeehouses —
is poorly understood. It's the lowly robusta that packs twice as much
caffeine. Among the gourmet brews, people commonly perceive that a dark
roast, with its strong flavor, has more caffeine than a mild-tasting,
light roast. But that, too, is wrong. Because some of the caffeine has
been burned off in the longer roasting,
darker coffees have less caffeine than light roasts, bean for
bean....."
http://m.theweek.com/article/index/261279/caffeine-the-worlds-favorite-drug