I am very surprised that Chile, Uruguay and Bolivia are so low given that it must be extremely cheap in those nations.
Import/export can be counter-intuitive. I remember visiting Israel in the 1970’s and wa ssurprised to find that the local markets had no Jaffa oranges at all. Turns out they were all exported. They were too valuable as an export crop, and the locals couldn’t afford the prices that other countries were willing to pay. Could this be a similar situation?
Huh? As far as I can tell Uruguay and Chile don’t even make enough coffee to export and Bolivia is 33rd or 34th on the list of coffee producing countries.
My dad is second generation Canadian, and grew up with his Grandmother,(immigrant from Finland) mother and aunts (first generation Canadian). He started drinking coffee at about 5, it was the only way his family could get him to drink milk was in coffee. He quit taking milk in it around age 15. He was a heavy coffee drinker until his 40s when stomach and blood pressure issues caused him to switch to tea.
He still will drink maybe a dozen cups of decaffeinated or herbal tea a day, including about 4 between supper and bedtime. I went through a 70 bag box of his favourite during his last visit of about a week.
I like coffee and tea and during the winter I have a mug that follows me around the house all day. I don’t know if it is genetic or learned behaviour or what. Drinking caffeine is a mess for me working night shifts though.
I’m 3/8 Swedish. I have not been able to drink coffee since November of 11, due to pregnancy and breastfeeding. I’m having to limit myself to 300 mg of caffeine a day now, which I mostly get from diet soda. IT SUCKS!!! I can’t wait until I can get back to my normal 1-2 pots of coffee a day, and actually feel awake again.
LOL that is a bit ignorant.
As a son of a Finn I starting drinking coffee at the age of about 8 or so. Coffee is a big part of social life and my mum reckons that due to the long nights or days caffeine was just a good pick me up particularly after the war.
I didn’t know that about Scandinavians and coffee-drinking. My mom was Norwegian, and was usually drinking (thin) coffee all day.
In the old book and movie about a Norwegian-American family, Mama’s Bank Account, many scenes center around coffee-drinking and introducing the older kids to it.
So now I have some background on both of those memories.
How many cups of coffee are made made from 12 kilograms of coffee? How many cups per day does that work out to then for the Finns? (Hmm, I find myself using the word “coffee” in two ways, one for the drink and one for the powder.)
IME coffee in Nordic countries is seriously strong.
I don’t normally drink latte, but I had to ask for it in Sweden because that was the only thing even close to a normal coffee in the UK. And even then it was mud-coloured, and I would feel ill after about 3 of them.
So…that…doesn’t really answer the OP, so much as change the question. If we’re measuring consumption in the sense of cups of coffee equivalent, then I think the stronger coffee would explain most of the difference. So then the question becomes why do they drink such strong coffee?
As far as the milk part goes, the Scandinavian countries are also noted for per capita milk consumption. Finland and Sweden are the top two:
Wouldn’t the Scandinavian amount of coffee contain dangerous amounts of caffeine? I tried to find out how much caffeine would be in the figures in Keeve’s table, but I was unsuccessful. Anyone know?
When I was in my early 20s I’d drink probably 8-10 cups a day at work (my cup never got empty; I topped it off any time it got close). On my days off I usually didn’t drink any coffee during the day, because I didn’t have a coffeepot at home. Any time I went to a restaurant - several times a week, in those days - I’d have coffee, and drink four or five refills (in addition to whatever coffee I’d drunk at work that day). Never had any trouble sleeping.
35 years later, I limit myself to one 20-24oz cup* a day, and avoid caffeine after around 1500 if I want to sleep at night…
- Starbucks “venti” or Dunkin’ Donuts “Great One”
Meh the view on caffeine is problematic, the latest views I have seen are that besides sleep disturbance it seems harmless.
I have a 12-oz travel mug, so that’s ‘2 cups’ of coffee. I fill it at home before I leave in the morning, then take it to my desk, then fill it up whenever it gets empty throughout the day (free coffee at the office). 8 cups is easily doable in an 8 hour work day.
Finland has a very high rate of heart failure, but if it’s because of coffee or something else I don’t know.
No, it’s the other way round. American coffee is seriously damaged by water. I was once having a couple of beers with some Americans and one of them said that he just couldn’t stand coffee. His colleagues, who had been to Europe many times before (this was his first time), commented that it was because he had only tried the watered down excuse for coffee that is common in the USA and had never been exposed to the real thing.
Damn, we are seriously odd in casa Aru - we go through just under a kilo of coffee a month - and I have pretty much given up coffee except for a single cup [12 oz coffee, 4 oz milk] a day. I used to drink the same amount as mrAru and our roomie, so we are down in consumption from about 3 to 3.25 pounds a month…
[we buy it in 1 kilo bags from BJ’s.]
I don’t think it has been mentioned that coffee drinking is part of Scandinavian culture in a way I don’t think it is in other countries. Aside of having coffee for breakfast and so on, there’s a fika culture here, which means that any pause in any type of work means a cup of coffee, if you’re about to meet someone down town you take a coffee, if you visit you mother or you brother, there’s a cup of coffee, and so on. It’s never a glass of water, seldom tea, you can’t traditionally have beer, nor wine, any such thing, or just a bit of fruit, or whatever, it is always coffee, coffee, coffee, on every social occasion however small or big.
This is about to change. There are variations of coffee like latte and so on, a glass of beer or wine is more accepted these days, so in a generation or two Sweden (where I live) will have adjusted to the rest of the world quite a bit, no doubt. But in short, 'tis just a coffee drinking culture here, whatever happens there’s a cup of coffee involved and it has been for a long time.
That might explain part of it in Scandinavia, where alcohol use is indeed expensive and discouraged. It does not explain why the Dutch are in the top six as well, as alcohol is cheap and easy to get here.
And yet a common complaint of Americans in Europe is that it’s “impossible to get a decent cup of coffee”?
Read: “A cup of coffee the way I’m used to”! 
But I must say that the most horrible coffee I have ever had was in a hotel in London. You could see the bottom of the cup when it was full.