(Roughly) Daily

Hot or iced, drip, French press, espresso, Chemex or Keurig, each of us downs about 23 gallons of joe a year on average. It’s in our blood. It’s also on our streets, where Starbucks outposts outnumber hospitals and colleges. And even on our resumes: 161,000 people list “coffee” as a skill on LinkedIn.
But the truth is, our cup is half empty. We could be drinking a lot more coffee and, in fact, we used to. In 1946, when America’s thirst for coffee peaked, each of us swallowed about 48 gallons a year on average, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture — more than twice current consumption. “We’d drink coffee with breakfast, coffee with lunch, and coffee with dinner,” says John Sicher, publisher of Beverage Digest. “And mostly, we’d drink it at home.”

The whole dark-roasted story at “America’s coffee cup is half full.”

* David Lynch

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As we reach for another soft drink, we might recall that it was on this date in 1905 that Paul P. Harris, a Chicago attorney, met with three friends– Gustave E. Loehr (a mining engineer), Silvester Schiele (a coal merchant), and Hiram E. Shorey (a tailor)– to found The Rotary Club, the world’s first service club.  It was so named, as the friends intended to rotate the site of their meetings among members’ offices.  Now known as Rotary International, the organization has 34,282 local clubs and over 1.2 million members worldwide.

[coffee photo sourced here; Rotary founders, here]