And how much of that is milk, honey, or just water from making weak coffee?
That’s the difference. What’s an extreme amount of caffeine compared to most people is presented as the normal servicing size. So the next step up is 2 of them.
I make it strong. No sweeteners. An ounce or two of heavy cream. The amount of caffeine is probably quite high.
Anyway, any concept of a "standard" coffee is substantially smaller and weaker than what any variant in the US actually is in practice, where espresso-based drinks nearly universally use 2-3 shots and drip coffees are poured in sizes ranging from voluminous to biblical flood. An 8 ounce cup of coffee is just unrealistically small here.
My point is just that 16 ounces of drip is not a "huge" amount of coffee in the US. It's pretty normal. Especially if you account for people going back for a second cup. I make no arguments about whether it's a good or bad thing.
Anyway, here are published numbers we can find for reasonable comparison:
Monster Energy 16oz cans
Original Green Monster: 160 mg
Monster Ultra / Zero Sugar: 150 mg
Monster Lo-Carb: 140 mg
Starbucks Brewed coffee
Pike Place Roast: Short 155 mg, Tall 235 mg, Grande 310 mg, Venti 410 mg.
Blonde Roast: Short 180 mg, Tall 270 mg, Grande 360 mg, Venti 475 mg.
Dark Roast: Short 130 mg, Tall 195 mg, Grande 260 mg, Venti 340 mg.
Decaf Pike Place: Short 15 mg, Tall 20 mg, Grande 25 mg, Venti 30 mg.
Starbucks espresso is 150 mg per standard double shot, so e.g. a grande caramel macchiato is 150 mg for 16oz of liquid, just like the monster energy drink can.
(In case you don't know, Grande, aka 16oz, is the most popular drink size at Starbucks, and short isn't even shown visibly on the menu.)
No reason to flip out just because you demonstrated your assumption was incorrect. Don’t worry we won’t test if you actually drink strong coffee.
> this person
You can find random YouTube videos supporting anything. The YouTube algorithm specifically promotes wildly inaccurate results as they are more interesting.
They don’t publish numbers for liability reasons as they can’t guarantee consistency across all stores, but finding the average isn’t difficult for them. Similarly people who are willing to sample across large geographic areas can find meaningful averages.
> most popular size
Most popular and representative are very different. You’re skipping a lot of their offerings. People can go from around 40mg of caffeine at Starbucks all well past 300, but 1-3 monster energy drinks per day starts high and skyrockets from there. Some days you want just a little more kick, and more granular options is a significant benefit.
I think at this point the zero cal/low cal ones are more popular. I don't know anyone who drinks Black Monster, while White Monster (zero cal) is so popular it's literally a meme. You go to a store and most of the shelf space is the low cal/zero cal options.