A little project

January 6th, 2010

I am not one for New Year resolutions.  I certainly have some goals for this year, but that doesn’t feel like the same thing.

However, I have embarked on one little project – and they say that committing in public increases the chances of your success – hence this post.  It is based on one question, that anyone who works in coffee gets asked A LOT:

So, how many coffees do you drink a day then?

I know this question gets some people very angry, perhaps rightfully so.1 One thing I did realise is that every time I answered it was a different answer.  I didn’t really know.  Using this year as my data pool I intend to find out.  I’ll be logging every cup of coffee to see how much coffee, and what exactly, I drink.

Having thought about it I won’t be including any diagnostic tastings/dialling-in sips or cuppings into this.  While it does certainly add to the caffeine intake they aren’t coffees I am choosing to drink for pleasure.  Whether or not people are interested I don’t know. (I have my suspicions) Nevertheless – I have found a nice way of cataloguing and presenting the data so I might do a progress post at the end of the month.

Footnotes:
  1. If you are reading this and have asked someone in the industry this question, don’t worry – nothing wrong with it, it is probably the first thing I would ask if I didn’t work in coffee.  I did catch myself asking a pastry chef how many cakes they eat a day…. [↩]

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  • michael mc laughlin

    great idea, been trying to figure this out with the rest of my shop for a while, from a costing point of view, on days i have tallied up staff coffeess its ran to about 30 coffees over a ten hour day, thats six per person, really adds up over a year

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  • http://www.cleaverbrand.com Irving Isler

    Just remember that you should give yourself sometime to adjust to your own observation. You’ll be acutely aware of the decision making processed (possibly overly analytical at first) when you begin.

    But it is an answer I’d like to know. I love coffee, but I will usually have one a day, two if I’m at my favourite café and having a good long chat, allowing me to indulge in a second (usually of a different style.)

    • James Hoffmann

      I am vaguely aware of this, but I don’t think it is really changing my consumption – comparing what I am drinking now to what I was drinking last year.

  • http://www.babycrow.co.uk babycrow

    I easily hit and mostly exceed my ‘not really recommended 5 a day’ of coffees but feel I am rather lacking in h2o. Perhaps I shall shadow your project with a ‘how many glasses of water per day’. It would probably be a woefully low maintenance project!

  • http://danielhumphries.typepad.com/ Daniel Humphries

    Great question, James.

    But define “cup,” please. As you know, on this side of the pond , those “cups” can get pretty big.

    My answer is around 5 or 6 four ounce cups a day, often replacing one or more cup with an espresso beverage.

    • James Hoffmann

      I plan to post exactly what I mean by cups when I post the data. Nothing bigger than 6oz really.

  • http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/alon/ Alon Halevy

    Great idea! (and apologies for asking you how many coffees you drink a day).

    I assume you have a cool cell phone app that lets you record every coffee you drink?

    • James Hoffmann

      I wish I did have a decent iphone app for this sort of thing – I am logging through syncing with twitter DMs, as well as access to the mobile version of the site on my phone, or the regular site through my computer.

  • Jeremy

    I pull 4 shots in the morning and typically drink them with a latte or Americano. Then in the afternoon I’ll have 1-2 cups of a single origin via a pour over.

  • http://theotherblackstuff.ie David Walsh

    Schrödinger’s cat.

  • http://onocoffee.blogspot.com The Onocoffee

    Back when I started smoking cigars in 1995, it was not unusual for me to drink 16-32 ounces of coffee while enjoying a favored Partagas Number 10 at my local tobacconist.

    Today, however, it is unusual for me to drink more than 8 ounces of coffee for my own pleasure.

    I now enjoy Diet Dr. Pepper with my Montecristo No.2 Habano.

  • http://barista-gear.com Nick

    That’s a neat concept – I look forward to seeing your tally. Will you do montly/quarterly updates or just a yearly total? Either way, should be fun!

  • Thomas

    So… How many cups of coffee do you drink each day?