These rankings are based on three criteria: number of coffee shops per 100,000 residents; average monthly spending on coffee; and some kind of caffeine index that tries to take in account all consumption of caffeine, not just coffee.
There is a pretty stock-footage slideshow of the twenty most caffeinated cities. But you don't need to click that link to know which city is #1. Yup, for all that work, the Daily Beast learned that the most caffeinated city in the country is...Seattle.
For perspective on Seattle's caffeine consumption relative to our own, I turned to Mike Seely, former RFT staff writer and current managing editor at our sister paper Seattle Weekly."Quantity, not quality," Seely told me in an email. "You can't walk, much less drive, five minutes in Seattle -- and not just the central city, but the outlying hoods as well -- without having some sort of non-convenience store coffee option at your beck and call.
"I'd put Meshuggah up against Seattle's finest coffee, but there'd need to be two dozen Meshuggahs around town to give Seattle a run for its money, ranking-wise. Seattle has also cropped up a slew of coffeeshop by day/bar by night hybrids, which is a welcoming trend."
