Coffee illustration for 360 Magazine

Coffee Capitals of America

By Hannah DiPilato

With National Coffee Day on September 29 followed by International Coffee Day on October first, Wren Kitchen delved into the nation’s coffee-drinking habits to see which states have the greatest consumption of everyone’s favorite hot beverage. 

Their research revealed that The United States drinks 48 billion cups of coffee each year, they have discovered the number one coffee capital of the United States, and the data shows which region has the highest demand for the caffeinated favorite. 

Coffee represents much more than just a drink. It’s a wakeup call bright and early in the morning, a chance to catch up with old friends or a moment for yourself in the middle of a chaotic workday. Pouring yourself a cup of coffee in your kitchen sets you up for the busy day ahead.

There’s no doubt The United States is a coffee-loving nation and a new report by Wren Kitchens has revealed which state craves coffee the most. They have also illustrated which iconic landmarks each state could build with coffee cups based on the coffee consumption of citizens. Grab a cup of joe and read on to find out how your state ranks.

Oregon has been crowned the ultimate coffee capital drinking over 113 Empire State buildings worth of coffee every year. The Beaver State shows that it’s citizens drink the most coffee based on the demand for coffee and population size.

The state consumes more than 624 million cups of coffee per year and if you were to stack up this number of coffee cups in real life, Oregon would drink enough coffee to create 113 Empire State buildings each year. 

With Oregonians having such an appetite for their cup of Joe, search data shows that 2.1% of the states 4.2 million goes online to search for their caffeine fix each month

The second-largest coffee-loving state is Colorado. With a population of 5.7 million, the state of Colorado drinks 852 million cups of coffee every year. The search data reveals that 1.9% of Coloradans head online to look up their nearest coffee spot.

Washington state follows on the list with the third-most online coffee searches, 1.8% of the state’s population searching for java each month, and more than 1.1 billion coffees consumed each year. This is no surprise coming from the state that founded Starbucks. 

When searching to find the region that drinks the most coffee, the west coast takes the prize. With three of the top five states having the greatest demand for coffee based on the Pacific, the West Coast is the place they pay homage to the barista. Nowhere more can this be seen than California with the state sipping more than 5.8 billion cups of the steaming beans.

The data was gathered by looking at search volumes against the population and the average amount of coffee consumed per person. Data for this research was collected from worldatlas.com, statista.com, ncausa.org and The United States Census Bureau, Population Division. 

To work out the coffee capitals, volumes per state surrounding coffee were researched and were calculated as a percent of the state’s population. Then the height, area, and dimensions of landmarks in the US were looked at; before working out the number of 12oz coffee cups it would take to fill each landmark. Finally, how many times each state could cover each landmark with the number of cups of coffee they consume each year was worked out.

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