Dude, It's Only Coffee! 5

 But... Why coffee?  There are so many other things we could be drinking and have been drinking.  But most of those things contain varying proportions of alcohol.  I did read an interesting article some time ago that suggested that we have coffee to thank for the Enlightenment.  Or, caffeine, anyway.   The reasoning?  That it was alcohol that kept the folks through the Dark Ages dumb, stupid and compliant, since they seemed to drink nothing but beer, ale, or wine.  But that was also because drinking water was generally unsafe, and the brewing and fermenting process for alcoholic beverages also killed off harmful pathogens.  And the chronic, daily dose of alcohol for almost everyone did keep them a little bit stupid, unlikely to think things through, and disinclined to imagine a better life.   Which could also be the reason why the Church encouraged the imbibing of alcoholic beverages, but for a while tried to ban coffee as the devil's brew.

There are various apocryphal legends and myths about the discovery of coffee, including shepherds and goatherds in Ethiopia, its country of origin, seeing unusually happy birds or happy goats eating the fruit of the coffee bush, while fluttering, skipping and dancing all over the place.  It was already being widely used as a beverage in various Muslim countries of the Middle East and North Africa by the fourteenth century, and Sufis often used it as part of their worship and prayer rites, especially for helping them stay awake during all night vigils of prayer.

Coffee came to Europe via Malta in the sixteenth century and spread like a slow sly virus throughout Europe.  Over the next two hundred years.  Suddenly, people began to think, openly, clearly, cheerfully and rebelliously.  Coffeehouses became in England known as Penny Universities, where people gathered regularly to chat, sip, discuss, sip, collude, sip, connive, sip, inspire, sip, and outrage, sip, and in two hundred short years Western Civilization was reformed, transformed and reborn, toppling sacred cows and reforming, challenging and changing everything known and unknown in religion, government, science, literature and art.  

The addictive properties of caffeine haven't seemed to do anything to hurt the industry either, making the coffee bean the gift that goes on giving, fattening national economies while transforming the denizens of the developed world into craven junkies, madly standing in line every morning in their local safe sipping site for their morning caffeine fix, getting them ready again to do their part for making the world safe for capitalism.