A word on COFFEE

from the greatest book I've read in a long time, Starbucked, by Taylor Clark.

Every day, Beethoven counted out exactly sixty beans for his ideal cup. Voltaire threw mugs of it back by the dozen, and the French novelist Honore de Balzac reputedly drank as many as sixty cups daily - a claim that sounds absurd until one reads his acid-trip account of coffee's effect on his mental faculties: "Ideas quick-march into motion like battalions of a grand army to its legendary fighting ground, and the battle rages...Forms and shapes and characters rear up; the paper is spread with ink - for the nightly labor begins and end with torrents of this black water.