STRANGE BUT TRUE: THE WEIRD HISTORY OF COFFEE: Dancing Goats, Coffeehouse Riots, Banned Brews, Smugglers, Strange Machines, Caffeine Addicts, and Other ... Cup (SparkTrail Strange But True Book 42)

Coffee has started revolutions, fueled wars, inspired smugglers, terrified rulers, powered armies, created fortunes, destroyed sleep schedules, and convinced otherwise reasonable people to spend fifteen minutes preparing one cup before sunrise. STRANGE BUT TRUE: THE WEIRD HISTORY OF COFFEE follows the world’s favorite caffeine delivery system from legendary dancing goats in Ethiopia to the coffeehouses of the Ottoman Empire, Europe’s suspicious first encounters with the “devil’s drink,” colonial plantations, cowboy campfires, wartime instant coffee, espresso machines, decaf experiments, and today’s wonderfully overcomplicated coffee culture. Along the way, you’ll meet sultans who tried to ban coffee, smugglers who stole precious plants, governments nervous about what people were discussing over their cups, soldiers who considered coffee nearly as important as ammunition, and inventors determined to build increasingly complicated machines just to make hot brown water taste better. You’ll also discover why Mocha was a place before it was a flavor, how coffee became tangled up with politics and revolution, why some of the world’s most expensive beans have taken a rather unfortunate trip through an animal, and how humanity went from boiling beans over a fire to arguing about grind size, water temperature, extraction time, and whether your latte foam has sufficient artistic merit. Funny, fascinating, and packed with bizarre true stories, The Weird History of Coffee is for coffee lovers, history lovers, trivia addicts, and anyone who has ever said, “Don’t talk to me until I’ve had my coffee.” Pour yourself a cup. Human civilization has made many questionable decisions. Coffee was not one of them.