International Coffee Day: Celebrating the Best Beverage Ever

September 29 is International Coffee Day! I was pleasantly surprised when I found out that there is an entire day dedicated to this wonderful beverage called coffee that I cannot live without. There is no possible way I would have graduated college without my daily – and during finals week, three – cups of coffee.

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In the U.S. and other countries, many businesses like Dunkin' Donuts and Starbucks offer discounted or even free (yes, really!) coffee on this day. Taiwan is relatively new to the game, first celebrating International Coffee Day in 2009.

To commemorate the existence of the best beverage ever (except for maybe tea, but I still can't make up my mind), here are some cool facts about coffee!

Coffee was discovered by goats. Wait, what? Apparently Ethiopian shepherds in the 9th Century discovered coffee when they noticed how their goats would dance crazily after eating coffee berries from coffee trees. Speaking of trees, coffee grows on trees! The trees can grow to be about 30 feet tall. Coffee beans are actually the seed inside a bright red coffee berry, which makes them a fruit!

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All the coffee in the world grows in the "Bean Belt," which is the area between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn.

The first webcam was invented because of coffee. Computer scientists at the University of Cambridge in England created the webcam to help people know whether there was coffee in the coffee pot or not. Because people working in other parts of the building didn't want to make pointless trips out of their offices only to find an empty coffee pot, the genius computer scientists invented a webcam to provide a live view of the coffee pot for people to check the status of the coffee before they left their offices.

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Even though many people say coffee is unhealthy, there haven't been many scientific experiments that have shown that coffee is truly bad for you (except when you drink a lot of it in one day, and I mean A LOT). Scientific studies have shown that the effects of coffee are generally benign and a little bit beneficial! In fact, one study that I like to tell people about shows that drinking coffee is related to lower risk of death. So for now, it is safe to say drinking coffee daily may actually help you live longer!

Even though my favourite type of coffee is the white chocolate mocha, which Taiwanese Starbucks only have at Christmas, I love everything about coffee. I love the smell of coffee in the morning. I love drinking coffee in the afternoon. I love cafés. I love reading in cafés. I love how coffee makes me feel. I even kind of love it when my dad makes me drink black coffee with no milk and sugar (okay, only sometimes).

What about you? Do you drink coffee? If so, what is your favourite type of coffee?