The first of five clues. Each one below gives a little more away.
I am often the first decision of your day, and rarely a difficult one.
Legend says a goat herder found me after noticing his flock would not sleep.
I grow in a narrow belt around the equator, and I am drunk mostly far to the north.
I arrive as a bean, a grind, a shot, or a hiss of steamed milk.
Espresso, latte, cappuccino.
Coffee
The goat herder is almost certainly a myth, invented eight centuries after the fact. The goats have appeared in every retelling since.
The drink appears first in Sufi monasteries in fifteenth-century Yemen, where it was valued for keeping worshippers awake through night prayers. Coffee houses followed in Mecca and Constantinople and were repeatedly banned, always for the same reason: men gathered in them and talked. London had over three thousand by 1700, and one of them, run by Edward Lloyd and popular with ship owners, slowly turned into the insurance market that still bears his name. What the drink actually does is modest. Caffeine does not add energy; it blocks the receptor that tells you how tired you already are.
Reading five clues at once is not the game. In the real thing they arrive one at a time and every wrong guess costs an hour. Play mystery #2 · today's mystery · the vault
Previous: mystery #1. Next: mystery #3. Or try #16, #17, #18, #19, #20, #21.