It all started with a casual conversation with one of my senior colleagues from Sweden. While having coffee together, he mentioned that people from Finland drink the most coffee in the world(on a per capita basis) – about 12 kg per year in 2007 (the similar figures for USA is 4.2 kg). He added that the other Scandinavian countries are at the top of this list. I found this very amazing and started to dig a bit deeper. Here is what I found.

The other top coffee consuming nations are Norway, Iceland, Denmark, Netherlands and Sweden. It is quite easy to see the reason behind this. All these countries have extended winters and drinking coffee is one of ways to keep the people refreshed. It is perhaps not a coincidence then that Seattle, where people have to stay indoors for a big part of the year due to rain, is the Coffee-capital of USA. Starbucks was born in Seattle and so was Seattle’s Best Coffee. Another popular US coffee brand, Caribou Coffee was born in another cold state – Minnesota.

This might seem ironic because coffee is grown in tropical climate and was consumed extensively by people in the Arabian deserts, before spreading to Europe. And another interesting twist here is that, Starbucks and other coffee majors are putting so much of effort to convert a tea drinking nation like China to a coffee drinking one.

Speaking of coffee, one of the most unforgettable scenes in a movie comes from the Morgan Freeman and Jack Nicholson starrer ” The Bucket List” (Warning : spoilers ahead). Freeman(a mechanic) and Nicholson(a billionaire) are cancer patients and they become friends while sharing a hospital room. Nicholson has the habit of drinking only the costliest coffee in the world, Kupi Luwak(costing about 50 GBP per cup of espresso), and invites Freeman to try the coffee. Freeman politely refuses the coffee with a strange smile.

Later on, they create a “Bucket list” of activities that they want to do before dying. One of the items in Freeman’s list is to “laugh until I cry“. Together, they do most of the things in the list before they are discharged from the hospital. Sometime later, Freeman gets hospitalised again and Nicholson visits him. At that point, Freeman hands over a paper to Nicholson and asks him to read it. As he starts reading, Nicholson’s face turns red with embarassment, which prompts Freeman to “laugh till he cries”. Wonder why? Watch the video and find out for youself  🙂