Henrietta Hay's Column

At twenty you can jump out of bed in the morning and land running -- if you want to. At my age you check first to be sure which joints are working properly and then get out slowly. But age has nothing to do with looking forward to that first cup of steaming, fragrant coffee.

Everybody has some sort of an addiction, some more benign than others. Coffee is mine. I find that I can survive even my own cooking if I can have a cup of good coffee at the end of a meal. And now, some 500 years after the very first one opened in Constantinople, we have coffee houses, so my addiction can be supported pleasantly.

My fondness for coffee started rather suddenly. The first time I tasted it was on our first family trip to the Western Slope when I was in High School. My dad had a meeting in Collbran, and one in Cedaredge, two days apart. On the map there was this little wiggly line connecting the two towns, and it seemed the logical and certainly the shortest way to go. We took off from Collbran in the old Hudson, but before we got to the top of the Mesa it started to rain. And it rained. And the wiggly little dirt road got slicker and slicker. Eventually, as it grew dark, the Hudson slid off the side of the road and died. We had a tent, but the mud wouldn't hold the stakes, and steaks which we could not cook because we could not make a fire out of soaking wood. The next morning when we were rescued, the rescuers got a fire going and made coffee. Ambrosia. That first sip on that cold, rainy morning may have been the high spot of my coffee life. Oh yes, as we took the long way around I had my first visit to Grand Junction, but we didn't stop for coffee.

According to legend, the joys of coffee were first discovered by a goat in 850 A. D. There is some disagreement as to whether the goat was in Ethiopia or Abyssinia, but who cares. The goatherd was tired and hot, half asleep in the sun when he noticed that his goats were dancing around joyfully on their hind legs. He checked on the berries that his animals were chewing on and took some of them back to the village. Everybody got a lot livelier and -- well you know the story from there.

Coffee was first cultivated extensively in the Arabian Peninsula. Initially it was brewed from green, unroasted beans, but by the late 13th Century the Arabs had learned to brew the real stuff. The Arabs drank so much coffee that the Christian church denounced coffee as "the hellish black brew." But Pope Clement VIII tasted it and found it so good that he baptized it and made it a Christian beverage, saying "coffee is so delicious it would be a pity to let the infidels have exclusive use of it."

The Turks claimed coffee to be an aphrodisiac, and husbands kept their wives well supplied. In fact, if the husband failed to provide her with her daily quota of coffee, it was a legitimate cause for a wife to divorce him! There was a Turkish saying, "If someone offers you coffee, you should respect, honour and remember them for 40 years for their great gift.

Coffee drinking had spread to Europe in the early 1600s and coffee houses quickly appeared. In England a cup of coffee cost a penny. It's believed that Captain John Smith brought coffee with him to the new world in 1607. That may have been one of his greatest contributions.

Of course, there are tea drinkers all over the world and they seem really to enjoy it, although I don't understand why. And each morning as I drink my morning coffee I watch a pair of humming birds having their morning drink of sugar water. Tastes do vary. But just for the record, coffee is the world's most popular beverage. More than 400 billion cups are consumed each year.

I like the Turkish proverb about coffee -- black as hell, strong as death, sweet as love. May I have a second cup, please?