A lifetime in cups
Coffee is one of the most popular drinks on Earth, with billions of cups drunk every day. For a regular drinker it becomes one of the most repeated small pleasures of life: two cups a day for twenty years is more than 14,000 cups. The chart above gives every year since you started its own row, with each cup icon standing for a hundred cups, so you can see the years stack up.
Behind those cups are some surprising totals: kilograms of pure caffeine, hundreds of kilograms of beans, and the yearly harvest of dozens of coffee trees. Change the cups a day and where you usually drink it to see how much it has cost too.
How we calculate it
We multiply your cups a day by the days since the age you started. Volume uses a standard 240 ml cup. Caffeine uses 95 mg per cup, the average for brewed coffee. Beans use about 10 grams of ground coffee per cup. Coffee trees assume a typical yield of about half a kilogram of roasted coffee per tree per year. Money multiplies the cups by the price per cup you choose.
| Habit | Cups a year | Cups in 20 years | Caffeine in 20 years |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 cup a day | 365 | 7,305 | 0.69 kg |
| 2 cups a day | 731 | 14,610 | 1.39 kg |
| 3 cups a day | 1,096 | 21,915 | 2.08 kg |
| 4 cups a day | 1,461 | 29,220 | 2.78 kg |
Worked example. Someone born on 12 April 1990 who has drunk two cups a day since 18 had about 13,550 cups by 30 October 2026. That is 3,250 litres of coffee, 1.3 kg of pure caffeine and around 136 kg of beans, the yearly harvest of about 270 coffee trees. At an average of $2 a cup, it has cost about $27,100.
Enjoying it well
For most healthy adults, up to about four cups of brewed coffee a day stays within the 400 mg caffeine guideline. It is worth keeping the last cup well before bedtime, since caffeine can affect sleep for six hours or more.
Questions people ask
How much caffeine is in a cup of coffee?
An 8-ounce (240 ml) cup of brewed coffee has about 95 mg of caffeine on average, though it can range from about 70 to 140 mg. A single espresso has around 63 mg. Health authorities in the US and Europe consider up to 400 mg a day safe for most healthy adults.
How much coffee does one cup use?
About 10 grams of ground coffee for a standard 240 ml cup, a little less than the 13 grams that specialty brewing guides suggest. So 100 cups use roughly a kilogram of beans.
How much coffee does one tree produce?
A typical arabica coffee tree yields only about half a kilogram to a kilogram of roasted coffee a year. That is why coffee farms need so many trees.
What price should I use?
Pick the option that matches how you usually drink it: brewed at home costs around 50 cents a cup in beans, while a café drink is often 4 to 6 dollars. The mixed option sits in between.
Sources. USDA FoodData Central (caffeine in brewed coffee); US FDA guidance on caffeine; Specialty Coffee Association brewing ratio; typical arabica yields from coffee growers’ associations. Calculations run in your browser; nothing you enter is sent anywhere.