As should be obvious by now, coffee is my favorite beverage. Black coffee. Black as a moonless night coffee. Coffee. Mmm… If left to my own devices, I'll drink two or three 12-cup pots in an afternoon, thinking little of it. I really love coffee.
I once took part in a caffeine dependence survey being conducted by some University of California Berkeley graduate students. I was given a list of caffeinated beverages and asked to enter an approximate quantity for daily, weekly, and monthly consumption. The figures were then run through some simple calculations and plotted alongside other entries. I was a lonely dot hovering well above the mean slope. I felt like a caffeine god observing his creations from a cloudy throne deep in the heavens.
It was satisfying.
I was given documentation on methods and organizations that could aid me in cutting back on my caffeine intake. I was told that for my body weight, I was consuming roughly six times as much caffeine as the range they had designated extreme dependence.
Haha.
I thanked them for their concern, but pointed out that the toxicity of caffeine is such that for my consumption to be fatal, I'd have to ingest about 150mg per 1kg of body weight. Taking into account its six hour half-life, that's something like five pots in an hour, which isn't physically possible. Besides which, I'd dehydrate long before then.