You used to be able to drink booze on a navy ship, until Josephus “Joe” Daniels came along.

Daniels, secretary of the U.S. Navy, banned alcohol on navy ships in 1914, just before the First World War. Instead, the crew had to drink coffee, which they referred to as a “cup of Joe.” That's why it's called a cup of Joe.

(Not Joe Daniels)

An order of Catholic friars wore brown robes with pointed hoods. Italian children who spotted them in the street would call out “Cappuccino!” which meant “little hood.” The coffee drink got its name either from the robe's color, or its pointed peak.

Coffee went fast in the computer lab at the University of Cambridge in the early 1990s. So fast, in fact, that they set up a video camera so students whose desks were far away could watch it on their computers and get their cup.

They eventually hooked that feed up to the World Wide Web so people all around the world could watch the coffee brew. It was the world’s first webcam.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, German company Melitta went from making coffee filters to making medical masks.

The company’s filters were the perfect shape to fit over a person’s mouth, nose and chin. They replaced the filter paper with a special fiber normally used in their vacuum bags and attached an elastic. They cranked out a million masks per day.

American's longest-running content marketing campaign began in 1932 when Maxwell House began producing a booklet of stories, songs and prayers for the Passover seder. Their coffee had just been declared kosher by a rabbi—erasing Jewish people's uncertainty about whether coffee was a bean (not kosher) or a fruit (kosher). The Maxwell  House  Haggadah  is still being published,  60 million  copies  later.

An NCAA pole vaulter who drinks six cups of coffee three hours before competing could fail a drug test.  However, that same pole vaulter can drink all she wants before an Olympic event. The Olympics have no caffeine limit.  The World Anti-Doping Agency may yet categorize caffeine as a performance-enhancing drug.

These are just six of the interesting bits of coffee trivia we’ve gathered on a long list at Bean Poet. There are 57 more where these came from! You can visit our post by clicking on the link below, and look forward to stumping your coffee-loving friends at your next trivia night.