In South Africa, it’s beer. By far.
https://www.southafricanmi.com/uploads/6/9/3/7/69372701/win1_1_orig.jpg
In the US Southeast, it’s either Coca-Cola or Sweet Ice Tea.
The UK actually consumes a lot of coffee, and probably not too far from the amount of tea. As for students and computer programmers; DEFINITELY coffee.
I agree with the comments about Germany, the main beverage is indeed coffee, and followed by mineral water. The latter sometimes mixed with apple juice (Apfelschorle).
My current place of residence? Most likely coffee and mineral water, in that order. Despite what you might think, the Poles do not drink vodka all the time - but they make up for lost time at parties and weddings. Tea is available here, but nobody makes it properly, plus they generally use some awful el cheapo teabags sourced from the bazaars of Karachi, or so it seems.
But tea and coffee cost a fraction of beer, so that chart is a little skewed, I think.
I mean, I drink more coffee than wine, but my weekly wine budget is probably ten times my coffee budget.
Our beer is quite cheap. Like, 89 US cents/fifth (that’s 64p/750 ml) for one of the more popular commercial brands. And that’s not counting the even-cheaper popular homebrew beers.
Yes, not as cheap as instant coffee or store-brand teabags, but not orders of magnitude more, either. And way, way cheaper than if you bought, say, coffee from our local Starbucks-equivalents.
And it tracks with my own experience, as well - for the non-alcoholic drinks, there’s a split - some will like coffee, others tea, and others fizzy drinks or fruit juice. But for alcoholic drinks, it’s beer>>>everything else. The Black population don’t drink wine much, beer is king.
“Default Beverage” and “what you’d offer a guest in your house” are different ideas to me.
I think in the US at large, the default is unquestionably Soda/Pop of some variety. At every fast food and quick serve restaurant the bottomless cup of pop is a staple. It would be unusual for anyone dining in to NOT get a pop. Even in TGI Fridays and the like, who aspire to push booze for the upsells, pop is still the runaway winner on every day besides Friday and Saturday. Fine dining and home cooking are of course different animals, but they are also a lot less common in non-COVID times. Sure water is on the table everywhere by default, but that doesn’t count. You’re getting it whether you want it or not in most places with servers.
But when you think about what do you offer a guest, that’s a different bit of calculus. You’re going to trend towards things that are considered more “social” in general. That means coffee, tea or beer depending on the circumstances. You’re also trying to offer something that makes a guest feel a little special and cared for, so a glass of water, while welcome on a hot day, isn’t gonna cut it when the in-laws drop in. There’s also the fact that what you have available at home is likely to differ from what’s available in a diner or restaurant. I’d say most responsible folks don’t keep bottled water on hand at home, nor do they always have cold pop or beer in the fridge for unexpected visits. But everyone can damn well whip up a pot of hot coffee in 5 minutes.
I’m in Canada, eh? So it’s beer. Like, Molson, eh?
Actually, no, at least not for me, although I think beer is more or less the national beverage. I’m a big consumer of wine – can’t really have a meal without wine, and otherwise a martini or gin and tonic. Or a spot of rum. In my old age beer is just too filling.
But I’m sort of the odd man out between generations. My dad liked beer (Molson Export, actually) and so does my son, though he drinks a microbrewery craft beer. But I hardly ever touch the stuff any more.
For non-alcoholic beverages, I think coffee, tea, and Coke are the most common. I rarely drink tea myself, but a morning coffee with toasted baguette and a sandwich and either Coke or a glass of wine for lunch are routine.
But in the larger scheme of things, as a nation, I think our beer consumption is admirable! Especially in hockey season! Even for me, as a normally non-beer drinker, nothing tastes as good as a $10 plastic mug of Molsons at a Leafs home game. 
Yes, this is something that was really noticeable to me when I first visited the US - adults drinking pop/soda with their meals (sometimes even in smarter restaurants). Here in the UK, adults would be drinking alcohol - maybe beer with a pizza, indian or a pub meal, otherwise probably wine*. If booze is out, because it’s, say, Monday lunchtime, we’d still mostly avoid pop**, and probably just drink water. Even on the vanishingly rare occasion I might have a MacDonalds (generally at somewhere like an airport), I would choose a bottle of water as part of my ‘Meal’.
*Any night of the week, if you’re eating out, booze is the default
**Obviously there are exceptions to this, we’re not robots.
It’s even more depressing than that, Stella, on that list, is brewed in the UK. VERY different from the Belgian version, which I drink in Belgium. I wouldn’t touch it in the UK. I actually suspect most of the listed foreign beers are actually brewed in the UK: Peroni, Coors Light, Amstel, San Miguel, Heineken, all of them are very likely brewed in the UK (information is not particularly easy to google fu), mainly because of the massive overfizzing that the UK Lager taster seems to prefer. It is possible one of them have carved their niche by importing a decent beer, but it will be a niche.
That was what I was trying to say but, looking back, I didn’t do a very good job at all. So: thanks for clarifying.
In my role of google fu consultant, the best way of determining origins is via a store website (I’m assuming that bottles are more likely to be imported than draft; and that if the bottled beer is brewed in the UK then almost certainly draft will come from the same source). So in the case of San Miguel, check out Tesco: https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/products/263928001
Produce of
Brewed and bottled in the U.K.
Name and address
- Carlsberg UK Ltd,
- Northampton,
- NN1 1PZ.
j
We drink a whole lot of iced tea here in Texas also, although that may have shifted in favor of soda in the last couple of decades.
That’s really interesting that UK beer seems to run to extremes of carbonation- most real ales are pretty close to flat, and the lagers are very carbonated. I wonder why that is? Here in the US, pretty much every beer is sparkling, but not to the degree of a UK lager.
My experience with Danish in-laws is that coffee (and cake) is the default offering (yet they don’t like being compared to Germans for some reason) and while they proudly love their beer (Carlsberg/Tuborg) they tend to have such pesky small cans I find it hard to get my British ‘drink on’ satisfactorily.
It frustrates me in the US that you carbonate everything and chill everything. These two things are done because it hides the taste, nobody wants to drink either flat or warm coke. However, if things taste good, then why ruin them with bubbles and chill all the taste out.
Some real ales have some bubbles in the UK, some are creamy (thus creamy head on Boddington, like Guiness).
However, the extreme to which we gas our lagers, is shocking. I’ve no idea why, though some, like Carling, went through a stage of doing a creamy lager. Popular for a bit. Not sure if it exists anywhere anymore. Yes, other places do gas their beers, like in Germany, but nowhere near to the same degree, I suspect lager in the UK is functional to get you drunk, rather than anyone liking it per se. But pubs do go through the horror of having nine different taps of lager which is pretty much the same, and no bitter/ale.
Don’t forget Caesars.
Great taste, even without the booze.
Well, carbonation does change the flavor of something. We drink a lot of sparkling water here at my house; it does not have the same flavor as just our ordinary tap water when it’s carbonated, and it’s not just a mouthfeel issue. (And science backs me up.)
In terms of serving temperature, cooler temperatures do feel more refreshing to me, but that could be cultural. And, yes, the flavors do seem to be calibrated towards a cooler serving temperature, so when they’re served at a higher temps, the balance seems off.
That said, I’ll drink most things at room temperature, even lagers that are definitely supposed to be chilled. And, yeah, it tastes wrong, but I don’t care.
And we don’t carbonate everything. Lemonade here is uncarbonated, as is iced tea. (Both being common drinks, not some obscure exception. In fact, right now I’m drinking an Arnold Palmer, a half iced-tea, half lemonade drink.)
Excellent point. I don’t know how it could have slipped my mind! The Caesar was invented in Canada, remains uniquely Canadian (even if many Americans know about, in my experience most US bars and restaurants don’t serve it), is Canada’s most popular cocktail, and happens to be my personal favourite! So yeah, worth a mention!
I think it’s more a matter of tradition and climate than anything else; British ales have hundreds, if not thousands of years of tradition behind them, being stored in naturally cool but not cold cellars, and without generally being too carbonated due to the casks and what-not used to store them.
Meanwhile most American ales have sprung up since the 1970s, and the practice of brewing beer and force carbonating it was standard. Similarly, the practice of putting beer in the refrigerator to serve it really cold is more than likely a legacy of the 40 or so post-Prohibition years when the only beer style available in the US was American lager, which is best served cold, and a big chunk of the US is considerably warmer than the UK for 2/3 of the year, so refrigeration is the only way not to be drinking 75 degree beer (24C). But the tradeoff is that it’s at 35-40F, regardless of whether that’s the right temp to serve it at. You see the same thing for the same reason with wine in fact- it’s either room temp(red) or fridge temp (white), even though it should probably be a bit cooler and warmer respectively.
Nobody made cask ales, or used beer engines or anything like that.
Doesn’t the yeast that’s used in fermentation affect whether a beer is best drunk warm or cold? IIRC, Continental yeast does its thing at much lower temperatures than what’s traditionally used in Great Britain.
It’s my favourite summertime cocktail, often prefer it without the booze. I just find it tastes much better without it.