The Coffee Bureau sought to brew interest outside the workplace, too. They asserted in sermons that it encouraged drinking and driving.
Legends say frisky goats prompted the discovery of coffee's energizing effects.
Kaldi, an Ethiopian herder, supposedly chewed the red berries and leaves that made his goats dance, and soon spouted poetry and song himself. By the tenth century, monks drank coffee to help them stay awake for their nighttime vigils, just as contemporary shift workers do. Coffee also was seen as a medication, and quickly filtered into everyday life. Coffee, he points out, is the foremost delivery system for caffeine, the world's most widely-used psychoactive drug. Some 90 percent of the U.S. population habitually consume some form of caffeine.