I meant supper as in the third m-w.com definition “3 : a light meal served late in the evening”. In Norway dinner is commonly (this varies a lot) eaten between 5 and 7 p.m., and the amount eaten requires another light meal before the end of the day to not go to bed hungry.
Yerba mate, not maté (nobody got killed).
I repeat my question: How many cups of coffee are made from 12 kilograms of coffee?
Let me add another: does roast type make a difference? (AFAICT, yes) Which types of roast are used in the countries being compared?
OK, that’s two. I can’t count.
I don’t know if “subtle” is the right word. You simply failed to communicate sympathy with the OP. Your post was bizarre. First you insult the OP, then you make exactly the OP’s point. I couldn’t make sense of it.
Glad you two have made up.
Holy cow, the rudes have come out in force today.
I can’t find it exactly now, nor is it online to quote the lovely prose, but I often remember a PG Wodehouse line about coffee in France–that after one sip, it was so stunningly bad that almost against his will he felt compelled to take another sip to confirm the unique impression. (I think of this whenever I taste anything so off-the-chart bad I have no clue as to how it got that way.)
I noticed this too early on. Obviously: switch to decaf.
ROFLMAO. 
I stand correctly. … errr… “corrected”. … whatever …
This is nothing new. I quote from the War Department’s Instructions for American Servicemen in Britain, 1942:
I have heard that Finland and Sweden are the Worlds biggest importers of high class coffee in the same way that UK and Ireland are the biggest importers of high class tea, which can explain a couple of things about relative quality.
Going with the aforementioned number from Wikipedia for Norwegian-strength coffee (63 g/L although I think my family aims for 70 g/L) that’s 190 liters of coffee per year for the Finns.
Not hardly if you’re capable of basic reading skills. Here, I’ll help you out with a little bit of bolding.
Note the hypothesis, the initial reasoning and the caveat that no actual research has been done.
That said the research isn’t that far off.
From http://faostat.fao.org/site/567/DesktopDefault.aspx?PageID=567#ancor
Orange Production Europe 2011 - 6.2 million tons
Orange Production USA 2011 - 8.0 million tons
Top producers are actually Brazil and the US with only Spain and Italy from Europe placing in the top 10
Apple production is surprising. While the US (~4 million tons) is the 2nd largest produce after China, Europe produces 15 million tons though it spread across France, Poland, Italy, Spain and other.
You’ll note in neither case is the Nordic region a large producer of these fruits making sourcing more costly due to transportation and duty costs.
Milk was, though it shouldn’t have been, a surprise with the EU producing 150 million tons vs. the 90 million produced in the US - though it further raises the question of destination for that milk - processed vs. beverage.
I then looked at % of Median Salary after taxes of certain products using 3 major and 3 sub major US cities weighted by population against Helsinki. It’s interesting
Helsinki
Domestic Beer (0.5 liter draught) 7.0%
Imported Beer (0.33 liter bottle) 7.8%
Cappuccino (regular) 4.2%
Coke/Pepsi (0.33 liter bottle) 2.6%
Water (0.33 liter bottle) 2.6%
Milk (regular), 1 liter 1.3%
Apples (1kg) 2.6%
Oranges (1kg) 2.6%
US (LA, Sacramento, Milwaukee, Chicago, New York, Boston)
Domestic Beer (0.5 liter draught) 4.0%
Imported Beer (0.33 liter bottle) 5.4%
Cappuccino (regular) 3.3%
Coke/Pepsi (0.33 liter bottle) 1.3%
Water (0.33 liter bottle) 1.2%
Milk (regular), 1 liter 1.0%
Apples (1kg) 3.0%
Oranges (1kg) 2.8%
So both fruit % wise is cheaper in Finland vs. the US though the US wins on Cappuccino (my coffee marker) and milk.
So my supposition was off base, but that’s what suppositions are for - determining a starting point for an investigation.
The really interesting piece is the % when you look at Coke/Pepsi - does this mean that soft drink consumption, if added to coffee consumption, would lead to a general leveling of overall caffeine intake?
Apparently not - http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1750-3841.2010.01561.x/full show that mg/day in Finland is 329 vs. 390 in Denmark and 168 in the US.
At this point the why seems to be cultural and not economic, but that’s a supposition on my part.
Wendell Wagner, I came across 20g of coffee grounds to 250 ml of coffee. That would mean 12kg would give 600 cups.
Okay, so indeed much lower than “eight cups” although the quantity of caffeine may be similar.
Grey, very interesting stats. What jumped out at me is the relative cheapness of milk in Helsinki compared to all those other beverages. 20 years ago, while backpacking through the Soviet Union and Europe, I met a cool guy in Helsinki who let me stay with him and his brother for a week. I remember being struck by how much milk he would drink, even though his fridge was tiny and underneath the counter, and the milk cartons were very small so he would buy like six at a time. (I told him how big our gallon jugs of milk are, and he was impressed.)
My wife’s family, from Minnesota and North Dakota, is of relatively recent* Norwegian extraction on both her mother’s and father’s sides (along with Swedish and German). Growing up in a four member family, she said it was typical to have three or four gallons of milk in the fridge at a time; my family only had one plus maybe a little left of the previous one. Yet I still thought we drank plenty of milk! My wife says the big stockpile of milk in the fridge is typical in all the Red River Valley families she knows. They don’t seem to drink a ton of coffee though.
*Both her grandfathers grew up speaking Norwegian at home.
So the Finns only drink 600 cups of coffee per year on average, which is less than two cups a day.
Well the 12 kg is a per capita value. If you assume 60% of the population are drinkers of coffee then the value jumps from 12kg/person to 20kg/coffee drinker giving you 1000 cups a year.
And that side steps the question cups of coffee consumption being a normal distribution across the coffee drinking population.
That might be it. In the Netherlands, the only country I know anything about, soda machines are less ubiqitous then in the US. Soda is regarded as a kids and teenager’s drink. Blue collar workers alsom might have a (one!) central soda machine in their cafeteria.
Adult white-collar workers drink water, coffee or tea, or maybe some powdered soup. Not soda. So if the populace needs a certain amount of caffeine, and gets it either through coffee, soda or energy drinks, that might explain it a bit. In the netherlands anyway.
Do the Swedes and Nordes drink less soda then average?
I really have no idea, but it seems to me that at least young Swedes drink quite a lot.
So that would mean that the average number of cups per day among the 60% who are coffee drinkers is still only a bit less than three cups per day. There were statements in the earlier part of this thread that made it sound like this was more like twenty cups per day. The only way that there could be significant numbers of 20-cup-per-day drinkers if they were nearly the only ones drinking coffee and everyone else drank less than a cup a day.
I thought I was a relatively big coffee drinker, but I pale in comparison to Johnny L.A. or many of these Scandinavians. I generally have a 16oz coffee on the way to work and then I drink 2-4 mugs (standard size mug) throughout the morning. So, I’d guess I’m drinking between 36-56oz per day during the work week. On the weekend, I usually have two mugs and that’s it.
I drink my coffee black, so those ounces are pure coffee with nothing else. I also drink it pretty strong, though not chewy.
Well no one said coffee consumption couldn’t be a nonnormal distribution, or even if my 60% estimate is close to being right.
I did find a paper from the University of Tampere http://www.uta.fi/FAST/FIN/GEN/to-coffe.html that goes into the cultural aspects of coffee consumption in Finland.
**Maastricht **, my link on caffeine consumption puts the Fins at 329 mg/day vs. 168 for the US. That’s a factor of ~2. Compare that to Finlands 12 kg/person vs. the US’ 4.2 (x3) and it looks like the US evens up caffeine consumption through either tea or soft drinks. I will admit it says very little about how much caffeine Fins consume from non-coffee drinks.