FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Food

Here's Exactly How Much Coffee Each 'Friends' Character Drank

Get the MacArthur Foundation on the phone and demand they give this guy a Genius Grant.

Kit Lovelace knows how to prioritize his time. He recently watched every single Friends episode—there are 236 of them, over 10 seasons—to determine precisely how much coffee each character drank.

As any Friends fan knows—and pretty much any human being living on the planet in the 90s—the six main characters in the popular TV show spent an inordinate time hanging around in a coffee shop called Central Perk. So why not devote your days and nights, as Lovelace did, to analyzing their coffee drinking habits—and sorting them into visually engaging charts and graphs, of course? The results can be found on Lovelace's Twitter account.

Advertisement

Actually, Lovelace says he performed this task while doing research for an article back in 2015. When he decided to repost the results of his investigation recently, the Internet took note and went bonkers.

Total coffee downed: 1,154 cups. Biggest drinker? Phoebe, with 227 cups of joe.

Chandler imbibed 212, Monica drank 198, Joey had 191, and Ross threw back 188. Somehow Rachel only drank 138 cups of coffee—but then again, she was working at Central Perk as a waitress for several seasons. Once she stopped working there and became a customer, she drank more. How do we know? Because Lovelace compared consumption increases over time. Naturally. As one does.

What's more, Lovelace tallied up the cost of this habit, figuring that cups cost about $1.50 each based on a price mentioned in one episode. He also factored in a 20 percent tip, since Chandler and Joey discuss that number in one episode Phoebe spent about $408.10 of her masseuse wages on coffee, assuming that what was in her mug throughout each season was, indeed, coffee. Lovelace said he made that assumption.

Lovelace insists that he is not "a huge die-hard fan of the series" and that he fast-forwarded through scenes that didn't involve coffee or display coffee cups. But he obviously appreciates some pretty arcane trivia, and said the deficit of coffee knowledge regarding "seemed like a significant gap in our shared pop culture knowledge."

What's next? We can see an analysis of the value of all the meth sold on Breaking Bad coming soon.