If you were to paint a few stereotypes surrounding our community, where would you start? Maybe in apparel habits: the t-shirt from a tech conference, or the ubiquitous hoodie. Or how about leisure pursuits: gaming, or even D&D? There’s one thing I can think of that unites most of us, we have a curious affinity for caffeine. Is it a propensity for working into the dark of the night that’s responsible, or perhaps those of us with ADHD find the alertness helpful, but whatever it is we like our coffee and energy drinks. Rare is the hackerspace without a coffee machine and a fridge full of energy drinks, and I have lost count of the times I have been derided by the coffee cognoscenti among my peers for my being satisfied with a mug of mere instant. Deprived of my usual socialisation over the festive period by the pandemic, and contemplating my last bottle of Club-Mate as I drank it, I took a while to ponder on our relationship with this chemical.
The plant we most associate with caffeine, Coffea Arabica. Francisco Manuel Blanco (O.S.A.), Public domain.
Caffeine can be found as a constituent of a variety of plants native to tropical and sub-tropical regions of the Americas, Africa, and Asia, in which it evolved as a chemical defence against pests. We were evidently not considered through their evolution to be pests as some insects or other plants are, because for us it’s a psychoactive stimulant in anything but extreme doses. Thus our ancestors who were first to chew a coffee bean, a kola ..
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