October 1st: International Coffee Day

3 min read

Originally written on October 1, 2021. Updated 2022

Coffee in the morning, coffee in a reunion with old friends, going for coffee with your new date…basically, most of us drink coffee morning, day and night with friends, colleagues, family members and lovers.
Whether you favour espresso, americanos, lattes or cappuccinos, iced, decaf or instant, Coffee Day, celebrated on this day, October 1, is the day to savour and appreciate it.

International Coffee Day is an occasion that is used to promote and celebrate coffee as a beverage, with events now occurring in places across the world.
The first official date was recent, 1 October 2015, as agreed by then International Coffee Organization and, apparently, it was launched in Milan, as part of Expo 2015.
This day is also used to promote fair trade coffee and to raise awareness for the plight of the coffee growers.
On this day, many businesses and shops offer free or discounted cups of coffee. The exact origin of International Coffee Day is unknown. An event was first promoted in Japan in 1983 by The All Japan Coffee Association (全日本コーヒー協会) and, since then, various events have been held called Coffee Day or National Coffee Day, with many of these on or around September 29.

Taste apart, many of us are aware of the fact that it can give us a good energy boost.
Not by chance, this is why we tend to have a cup of coffee first thing in the morning, right?
But maybe you didn’t know that the benefits of coffee extend a lot further than this, as it can help to burn fat, as it can increase your metabolic rate by as much as 11%!
Coffee also contains a number of essential nutrients, including niacin, magnesium (vitamin B3), potassium, manganese, pantothenic acid (vitamin B5), and riboflavin (vitamin B2), but it has also been shown to enhance physical performance drastically!
If that was not enough, coffee is the greatest antioxidant source in the Western Diet, and it can also help you to live longer according to a number of different studies, as well as helping to fight depression and making you feel happier.
But this isn’t an utopia, because this is something that has been noted in a study that was published by Havard.

This day also marks the long history of the beloved drink: According to historical records, coffee beans and their properties have first been discovered in Ethiopia, and its discovery comes with an interesting story.
The beans are actually the pits found in the coffee berry or cherry and, as story goes, a 9th century goat herder, named Kaldi, noticed their stimulating effects on his beasts and began experimenting.
Around the 700s AD, his herd of goats started acting strangely, almost as if they were dancing. Kaldi discovered that they were eating a sort of red bean and concluded that was the cause of their behavior. Thus he decided to share his findings with a monk who required something that could help him to stay awake all night as he prayed, but another story claims that the monk refused and threw the beans into the fire, and the pleasing aroma that came from it was just wonderful.
Coffee drinking was originally popularised in the Arab world from around the 15th century spreading across Asia then to Italy and across Europe and to the Americas and, finally to your coffee cup.

And, of course, the best way to celebrate International Coffee Day is with a good cup of coffee!