Coffee and sheep don't mix

I love coffee. I love going to coffee shops even more, especially to enjoy a nice cup of the black stuff, as opposed to some other tasty beverage. I enjoy the exposed brick work surroundings, the miss matched leather chairs and people watching the 'society' ladies for whom this is a vital daily engagement.

My favourite tipple is an Americano - an espresso with hot water. I normally enjoy it with a little hot milk, but if I'm feeling a bit sans souci, I take it black.

At home I tend to use a cafetière to make my favourite cup and will either grind the beans myself (at times when I feel especially cultured) or use the ready ground packs from the supermarket. Wherever possible I steer well clear of the instant stuff. I am an unashamed coffee snob.

Coffee has been drunk for centuries. Reports tell us of coffee beans being boiled in water and consumed in certain parts of the Middle East as far back as 1000 AD. One legend has it that a shepherd from Ethiopia, named Kaldi, noticed the effect coffee beans had on the behaviour of his sheep as they chomped away at the little red "cherries" in their new pasture. Paying homage to the phrase "that which does not kill us makes us stronger", Kaldi sampled a few of the cherries himself and was soon running around the field like a mad man surrounded by mad sheep. Just when you thought things couldn't get any worse for the shepherd on a caffeine trip, a monk stops by and scolds him for partaking of the "devil's fruit." The monks quickly changed their tune though when they discovered this fruit helped them to stay awake for their nightly prayers.

The best cup of coffee I ever sank was in my former office, I kid you not. A more junior colleague treated me to a small bag of Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee (no doubt because I'd just handed in my resignation). I'm told, by Wikipedia, that Blue Mountain is one of the most expensive coffees in the world, and tasting it you can see why. It’s incredibly smooth with no bitterness. The Japanese are nuts for it and will pay anything up to $10 (£5) per cup. I must say it was a very welcome break from the usual stale stuff we refuelled on at our desks.

The worst cup I ever tried was from the vending machine in my local leisure centre. It was like tarmac (or asphalt to our American cousins) meets sweaty feet. Jamaican Blue Mountain this was not. It was so awful, I started drinking the oxtail soup instead. Desperate times call for desperate measures.

Coffee is a drink that means different things to different cultures.

To this day, Bedouins will serve a small cup of viscous black coffee to visitors. I have my suspicions that they are really serving surplus oil scented with a little coffee essence, but haven't been able to confirm this. Either that or they use the same caterer as my office.

Italians, on the other hand, will savour their coffee as they round off a good meal. If you're ever in Rome, or some other place in Italy where they drink coffee (which is pretty much everywhere), enjoy a nice espresso after your lunch rather than that cappuccino you're hankering after. The espresso is much lighter and less stodgy, but still gives you that caffeine kick up the backside to keep you going through the afternoon. You know what they say, when in Rome… and all that.

It has been reported that coffee can lower your risk of diabetes, Parkinson's disease and colon cancer – what a drink! Pomegranate juice begins to look like chocolate thick shake with extra ice cream in comparison.

A Turkish proverb says: "Coffee should be black as Hell, strong as death, and sweet as love." Now I should clarify at this point that I don't work in advertising. Unless you're marketing a special coffee aimed at Goths, use another strap line – this one scares the hell out of me.

Some useless coffee statistics for your delectation:

• 27% of US coffee drinkers and 43% of German drinkers add a sweetener to their coffee. (Heathens.)
• Among coffee drinkers in the US, the average consumption is 3.1 cups of coffee per day. (Why does anyone bother to make a tenth of a cup of coffee? Go on, be crazy - have that fourth cup.)
• Branded coffee chains now have more than 3,000 outlets in the UK with a turnover of around £1.3 billion. (That's more readies than the GDP of the Faroe Islands.)
• Those who drink on average at least 2.37 cups of coffee per day are, on average, drinking less coffee than those who drink on average at least 3.43 cups of coffee per day. (I made this one up.)

I'm off now to take my coffee beans out of the freezer, pull the grinding machine down from the shelf, take the cafetière out of the cupboard, grind the beans, do battle with the plunger on the cafetière and then wash up all the appliances whilst trying not to get coffee granules on every surface.

That old jar of instant is suddenly looking a lot more attractive right about now…