Hi, I'm Nick Greene. Welcome to the salon, this is mental_floss video, and did you know...

That Ludwig von Beethoven was a coffee snob? He supposedly insisted that his cups be made with exactly sixty beans each. That's just the first of many facts about coffee that I'm gonna share with you today. *sips coffee* Ah, there's more where that came from.

*intro music plays*

Coffee was banned in Sweden in 1746 because it was thought to be dangerous, and King Gustav III even set up a test with a set of twins to prove that it would shorten your lifespan. He forced one twin to drink coffee all day, every day and the other was made to drink tea. Gustav never found out what happened though, as both twins outlived him. In case you're wondering, the tea drinker died first, at the age of 83.

Prussian higher-ups hated coffee too because it was becoming more popular than Prussia's previous breakfast drink of choice, beer. In 1777, Frederick the Great issued an official statement urging his subjects to drink beer in the morning and not coffee. Whatever you say chief. (1:03)

If the legend is to be believed, coffee lovers have a bunch of goats to thank for their favorite drink. Thousands of years ago, an Ethiopia man named Kaldi noticed that his goats acted a little crazy after munching on berries from a certain tree. Inside those berries were coffee beans and his goats were experiencing what you or I would call a buzz. Cheers goats. Drinking Coffee is a relatively new pursuit. Up until around one thousand C.E. the beans were eaten, not brewed. African tribes would grind the berries together and then add animal fat to produce bite-sized energy pops. The United States drinks more coffee than any other country in the world. Finland however, drinks the most coffee per capita. Meanwhile, on our wall, the lobster drinks the most coffee. 

To make decaf coffee, the caffeine is literally removed from the bean. This leftover caffeine is usually sold to soda manufacturers and pharmaceutical companies. Chock Full O'Nuts Coffee is not actually full of nuts. The original locations were a converted chain of old nut stores. Honore de Balzac supposedly drank 50 cups of coffee a day to help his writing. Miraculously his writing does in fact include punctuation. 

In order to fund their sea voyage to the 1932 Olympics in Los Angeles, Brazilian athletes loaded their ship with coffee and sold it as they made their way North. Starbucks is named after captain Ahab's first mate Starbuck in Moby Dick. There's no apostrophe to make it possessive so we must assume the name refers to the whole plurality of first mates, then would they still be called first mates if there are so many of them, or would it be tied for first mates? 

(sighs) I had to cut down on the coffee. The first ever web cam was pointed at a coffee pot. It was set up in 1993 at University of Cambridge computer laboratory so researchers could monitor the coffee situation without having to leave their desks.

During the Civil War, both sides, Union and Confederate, were hopelessly addicted to coffee. Naval blockades made the stuff difficult to get for  southern troops. So individual truces were made by individual soldiers on the front lines to negotiate trades. Jonesing Southern soldiers would swap their plentiful crop tobacco to their Union counterparts for coffee beans. For the longest time, Hawaii was the only state in the United States to grow coffee. Now you can drink coffee grown in California and Georgia. Finally I return to this line ? to tell you that one of the most expensive coffees in the world is made from beans that have been eaten and digested by a weasel like creature called a palm civet. This poop coffee runs for about 600 dollars a pound. 

Thakns for watching Mental Floos Video which is made with the help of all these nice people. Again, I'm Nick Green. Bye.