[jhbadger]

>Coffee – and what Americans like me mean by that is black coffee, filter coffee, drip coffee – is much more popular in the US than Europe. It became popular after the Boston Tea Party as a more patriotic alternative to the unjustly taxed tea.

Sort of. What a lot of people don't realize is that coffee used to be very popular even in England. Isaac Newton was a coffee drinker. The intellectual elite of England met in coffee houses in the 1600s and 1700s. The Boston Tea Party may have led to the decline of tea in the US, but it wasn't as if coffee was some weird unknown drink to them that they had to learn to drink in the aftermath of it.

[sham1]

Also that quote seems a bit silly anyway. Because if we look per-capita, European countries beat the US in terms of coffee consumption. Of course, in absolute amounts, the US will have more consumption than most, but then again, with a population of 300 million people, it'd be more surprising if the absolute numbers weren't in the Americans' favour.

OTOH, for per capita consumption, it has tended to flip between The Netherlands and Finland, wherein for example here[0] it's said that the Dutch drank 8.3 kilograms of coffee per capita in 2020, while Finns drank 7.8 kilos per capita. For comparison, the Americans used 3.5 kilos.

Of course, TFA could have also meant that drip coffee is more popular across the Atlantic than here, but even that I do find hard to believe. Besides, if that's the case, then this point was expressed in an odd manner, frankly.

---

[0]: <https://www.statista.com/chart/8602/top-coffee-drinking-nati...>

[memkit]

I was similarly confused and finally decided that the commenter could have also been referring to the unsubstantiated fact that Americans drink more black/drip/pour over than Europeans, who mostly drink espresso-derived variants.

I say "unsubstantiated" because a cursory web search didn't turn anything up. Anecdotally, it seems true.

[dagw]

mostly drink espresso-derived variants.

I'd say in general there is a very clear north/south divide in Europe when it comes to coffee. Northern Europe drinks more filter coffee and souther Europe drinks mostly espresso. Of course over the past couple of decades a lot of 'foreign' influences has greatly changed how Northern Europeans drink coffee (much like in the US)