Leslie Grove, age 10, of Eugene, Oregon, for his question:

When did coffee drinking start?

Historians suspect that coffee drinking started in Arabia about 700 years ago. The Arabic name for the fragrant brew was qahwah    and we remodeled it into our word coffee. About 300 years later, coffee drinking spread to Turkey, then to Italy and westward through all of Europe. In the 1600s, coffee shops were very popular in all the cities. In the 1660s, settlers from Europe brought coffee to the Americas and soon after that coffee plantations were started in Brazil.

Coffee shrubs grow wild in Ethiopia and there the peppy brown beans were discovered ages before anyone thought of using them as a beverage. There is a legend that goatherds noticed that their flocks ate the wild berries    and became more frisky than usual. So they sampled some    and they too felt peppy. For a long time the people chewed the wild berries, perhaps like candy, and brewed them to make wine and medicine. But nobody seems to have thought of brewing a beverage from roasted coffee berries until sometime in the 1200s.