Coming into college, the smell of coffee was too pungent to handle. I would plug my nose in its presence and wouldn't dare drink it. When all my friends wanted to drive through Starbucks, I always reached for the most non-coffee frappuccino I could find on the menu. Now, looking back on my naïve days, I wonder how I ever got by without it. Some may call it an addiction...and honestly, I would, too.

Over the last couple of years, I have come to learn a lot about the drink of liquid gold. Contrary to popular belief, you do not need coffee to wake you up, even though my dad swears by it. Early in the morning is when your body produces the peak amount of a hormone called cortisol which attributes to helping you feel alert and awake. So while you may crave to grab that morning dosage of caffeine, try holding off a few hours first to let your cortisol amounts settle or else you may begin to rely on coffee rather than the cortisol to keep you awake.

As the world's second most traded commodity, under the number one petroleum, coffee is a pretty universal product. Humans must have something with black drippy liquids. On average, 2.25 million cups of coffee are consumed per day with New York drinking almost 7 times the amount of any other city in the United States. That is a lot of coffee for the 54% of Americans that are drinking it daily. Coffee drinkers unite! You can thank coffee for stripping $1,092 from your wallet each year, but let's be honest, it is worth it. Beware of drinking too much coffee because it has been scientifically proven about 70 cups of coffee can kill the average 154-pound human while a few cups a day is actually believed to prolong your life. But don't worry only drink 69 cups to scale back and you will be as healthy as can be.

Starbucks is the ultimate coffee grounds. Ha ha...coffee grounds. With about 87,000 different drink combinations, Starbucks has a drink to fit any and all preferences. Opening on average 2 new stores a day for the past 27 years, Starbucks is sweeping the nation. Specifically, in Santa Fe Springs, California, there are 560 stores within a 25-mile radius. The average coffee drinker consumes about 3 cups of coffee, Arabic for "wine of the bean", per day.

So, you can thank the Ethiopian legend of energetic and dancing African goats for the discovery of the drink sent from the heavens. If you are looking for an energy pick me up, look for your nearest Starbucks rather than soda machine or energy drink as contains much more caffeine than the average Coke or Red Bull. With this added knowledge I hope all my fellow coffee drinkers can appreacite it just a little bit more.