Photo: Erin Meister

Erin Meister trains baristas for North Carolina-based Counter Culture Coffee and sporadically maintains the blog Meet the Press Pot from her home in New York City. This is part of a series of tips for the caffeine-addicted.

There are a lot of awesome jobs out there, but if I may say so, I think I've got one of the best: Getting paid to taste, learn and teach about coffee. (Great for the palate, maybe not so great for a night's sleep.) But as much as I've been able to learn while busily caffeinating New York City, there's always more to be discovered. Coffee's so fascinating, it could be its own Trivial Pursuit category. I thought I'd share five of the best facts I've picked up along the way about our favorite little buzzin' bean, for you to wow your coffee-loving friends with.

5. Espresso has less caffeine than a cup of drip coffee ... sort of. A 7-ounce cuppa joe averages about 150 mg of caffeine, while a 1.5- to 2-ounce shot of espresso yields roughly 100 mg (data varies from source to source). But yes, strictly speaking, drip coffee does have more caffeine per total volume -- but not per ounce. Espresso wins that round, hands down.

4. Coffee is one of the most complex things we consume. Clocking in with nearly 1,000 aromatic compounds (and more being discovered all the time), coffee runs laps around even red wine, which contains about a third as many.

Three more after the (jittery) jump!

While I regularly lose my keys, often misplace my wallet, and have been known to forget my own name, I pride myself on my impressive ability to remember completely random facts. My wife calls me the largest repository of useless knowledge in the Western Hemisphere, and I have to admit that my mind is a steel trap, at least when it comes to completely meaningless trivia.

With that in mind, I was eager to take Mental Floss' cereal trivia test. Having spent much of my youth sucking down mass quantities of sugary slop while watching Saturday morning TV shows, I figured that I could easily take whatever Mental Floss had to dish out.

I received a humbling 50%. If you get a chance, take the quiz and let me know how you did. I need to know if there's anybody else out there who's feeling the icy hand of trivial humiliation!

As a general rule, I'm not much of a game player. I've never been a huge fan of cards and most board games leave me cold. The one exception to this rule is in the area of trivia games. I LOVE trivia and often will excitedly pull out my aging copy of Trivial Pursuit when someone mentions the possibility of playing a game. Couple that trivial obsession with my fairly well-established love of food and you understand just how ecstatic I was when Foodie Fight showed up in my mailbox late last week.

The game contains a set of trivia cards, six game boards, content-area pieces and a colored die. It is packed into a compact box that has a hidden magnet closure, so that the lid clicks into place pleasingly. You can play on teams or as individuals or you can be like me and start playing against yourself. When it arrived I immediately opened it up, settled into the loveseat in my living room and read the questions on more cards than I care to admit (no one is actually going to want to play it with me after they read this post). I knew quite a few of the answers, but was stumped more than once.

While I'm looking forward to playing the game with other real humans, I'm already certain that it will be given a place of honor right next to my other trivia games, to be trotted out any time someone says, "Hey, anyone want to play..."

The Partnership for a Drug Free America is famous for using a fried egg analogy in their public service announcements in the 80s and 90s. Those eggs didn't fare too well in the ads, but eggs are actually quite good for you. Test your egg knowledge in this quick and easy true/false quiz from the Detroit Free Press:

1. One egg supplies 10% of the protein you need in one day.
2. Eggs are a good source of vitamins A and D.
3. When a recipe calls for eggs, you should use extra large.
4. If you are trying to cut down on cholesterol, in most recipes you can substitute the whites of two eggs for one whole egg.
5. Grading, such as AA, A and B, indicates quality rather than size.
6. Eggs as old as five weeks that have been stored in the refrigerator are safe to use.
7. Free-range eggs are more nutritious than other eggs.
8. Fertilized eggs have a longer shelf life than unfertilized eggs.

I was noodling around in my files and food magazines and ran across some info that I thought would make a good food trivia quiz.

Food Trivia Quiz

1. When and where did McDonald's open its first drive thru?
2. Who turned the world on to Blackened red fish?
3. Who are Tim and Nina and what are they known for?
4. In 1982 what became ET's favorite candy?
5. When was the Slurpee introduced?
6. What is Alice Waters known for?
7. Who was the first Ronald McDonald?
8. What cities recently banned the sale or use of certain food products.
9. What storm caused the devastation of one of the top food destinations in the world?
10. Where was the original home of Subway?
11. Who wrote "On Food and Cooking" the book that was the catalyst for the combining of the culinary arts and science?
12. When did the Blooming Onion first appear on a chain restaurant menu?
13. When did the Food network first start broadcasting?
14. When and where did the first Starbucks open?
15. The first dishwasher was introduced to the public in 1893. What decade did it finally catch on?
16. What was the first diet soda?
17. What was the "Space Age drink" and when was it introduced?
18. Waring invented the blender in 1937. What year was the one millionth blender sold?
19. What was the cereal Mikey likes?
20. Who wrote "Mastering the Art of French Cooking"?

Don't peek at the answers! They're after the jump.

July is National Hot Dog month and summer is certainly an appropriate choice, as Americans eat 7 billion hot dogs during the summer (from Memorial Day to Labor Day), cooking up two thirds of them in the backyard or at home, and a total of 20 billion every year. On the 4th of July alone, 150 million hot dogs will be eaten in the US and most will be grilled, since 60% of Americans say that they prefer to eat them that way.

Want to test your hot dog trivia knowledge? Take the National Hot Dog and Sausage Council's online quiz and see if you have the goods on one of America's favorite foods. I have to admit that I only got 7 out of 10. What are you waiting for? Test the test and let us know how you scored in the comments!

 

More hot dog stories:

• How do you dress your dog? 
• Peanut butter hot dogs 
• Slashfood Ate (8): Best Hot Dogs 
• How hot dogs got their name 
• Microwaveable hot dogs... with buns? 
• Heinz makes the best ketchup 

Wikis, if you're not familiar with them, are online pages that anyone can edit. This leads to comprehensive definitions on just about any subject from applications like the Wikipedia. For a recipe, this means that all the collective knowledge of cooks can be added in to one central location. Does it make the perfect recipe? The directions for making a grilled cheese sandwich at WikiHow look pretty clear and even though the instructions are simple, keep in mind that every great chef (and hungry cook) must start somewhere. If the stove top method is too conventional, you can also try using a George Foreman grill or an iron.

Speaking of grilled cheese, here are a few facts to tide you over while you wait for your sandwich to be done:

• Americans make 2.2 billion grilled cheese sandwiches at home each year.
• The most popular two cheeses for grilled cheese are cheddar and American, though Gouda, Swiss and Gruyere are also quite popular, especially in Europe.
• 30% of Americans name the grilled cheese as their favorite homemade sandwich
• Grilled cheese often has add-ins and the most common is tomato, followed by bacon/ham, potato chips and pickles, while other variations include the French croque-monsieur and croque-madame.

We have some facts and figures about general drinking trends, but what about just beer? Here are a few fun bits of beer trivia, from Here's to Beer and other randomly collected factoids, to quiz your buddies when you're all relaxing over a brew and a game after work:

• According to the Canadian Ace Brewing Co., there are 6,998 drops in a 12-ounce bottle of beer.
• St. Arnold is recognized by the Catholic Church as the patron saint of brewing beer.
• A 12-ounce beer has fewer calories than two slices of standard, sliced bread.
• In Fairbanks, Alaska, it is illegal to give beer to a moose.
• The country with the most brands of beer - 400 - is Belgium.
• In Germany, you can buy beer popsicles.
• Cenosillicaphobia is the fear of an empty [beer] glass

For more refreshing beer info, check out Slashfood's beer archives!