If you know anything about Ross, Rachel, Joey, Chandler, Monica and Phoebe besides their names, then you also know about Central Perk. After all, it seemed like the FRIENDS spent almost every other waking hour at the cosy café.
But have you ever wondered just how much coffee they might have drunk over the 10 seasons they hung out at Central Perk?
Well, someone sat down and counted, and the results are astonishing! Twitter user Kit Lovelace recently posted the results, with a whole set of helpful charts and graphs.
It turns out Phoebe drank the most coffee, having had 227 cups in 236 episodes. She was followed by Chandler (212 cups), Monica (198), Joey, (191), and Ross (188). Rachel drank the least coffee in the series with only 138 cups to her credit.
Source: Kit Lovelace/Twitter
Lovelace also found that the FRIENDS characters' coffee fixes reached a high earlier in the show, in seasons four, five and six.
Source: Kit Lovelace/Twitter
Lovelace even calculated how much each of them spent on coffee over the 10 seasons. He based the price for one mug of coffee on the episode The One With Five Steaks And An Eggplant, where a coffee and a scone are shown to cost $4.12. Putting together other stray mentions of the price of coffee and the tips, Kit arrived at a fairly clear numbers for how much they spent.
This works out at roughly $1.46 per character, per episode. Roughly the price of a single Pret filter coffee (before we tanked the pound...)
— Kit Lovelace (@kitlovelace) June 27, 2017
(FYI: We know they leave 20% tips because in the episode The One With Unagi Joey questions the amount left and Chandler confirms it as 20%.)
— Kit Lovelace (@kitlovelace) June 27, 2017
"It's not unreasonable to assume therefore that a coffee is ~$1.50. That being so, including tips, I also worked out how much they spent..." he said and tweeted the following table.
Source: Kit Lovelace/Twitter
Lovelace told Jenna Amatulli for Huffpost, that he had researched on the subject for a piece he wrote in 2015. He said that while he hasn't been a part of the show’s cult following, he came to the project as a coffee drinker – kicking off research on the FRIENDS characters' caffeine consumption during a "particularly slow week”.
"I was a little disappointed to see that no one had actually tried to figure out the real numbers, given that the source material was out there,” he said.
Lovelace’s calculations were inspired by a Scientific American blog post titled, "How Many People Could You Kill With All the Caffeine Consumed on Friends?". The author of that post, Kyle Hill, claimed that the friends drank a whopping 445 gallons of coffee in the entire series – enough to start a small coffee importing company.
However, pointing out that each episode was only a part of the characters' lives, Hill also wrote:
"If each episode represented a week of time, on average, then these java junkies downed nearly 3,100 gallons of coffee – enough to fill over half a freight container. This amount of joe could send over 1,900 people to the hospital."