May 21, 2020

"There’s an idea in every cup, and you need a lot of ideas to get one good one...."

"People have criticized me for years — family, friends, doctors. I get messages from people saying it’s physically impossible to drink 25 a day.... People are constantly telling me that it isn’t healthy or it’s bad for my stomach or it can kill me.... But my blood pressure is always perfect. I work for myself and I get seven to eight hours of sleep a night, not a problem. I might go to the bathroom a little more than the average person. That’s it.... If I ever do decide to expand beyond 25 cups, my dream is to outdo Balzac’s reputed 50 cups a day, I’ll likely have to be more scientific about things, to prevent overdosing. But so far so good. I’m going to make another cup right now."

Said Charles Anderson, quoted in "A Brief Chat With a Guy Who Drinks 25 Cups of Coffee Per Day" (Grub Street/NY Magazine).

Here's his Twitter feed. Examples:


ADDED: I made a "Balzac" tag for this post and then went back to add it to posts in the archive. I found 2. In one, I'm quoting something in an article about a great writer retiring:
There have always been writers, like Thomas Hardy and Saul Bellow, who kept at it until the very end, but there are many more, like Proust, Dickens and Balzac, who died prematurely, worn out by writing itself.
The other is in my account of Chapter 2 of Bob Dylan's book "Chronicles." I quote Bob:
You can learn a lot from Mr. B. It's funny to have him as a companion. He wears a monk's robe and drinks endless cups of coffee. Too much sleep clogs up his mind. One of his teeth falls out, and he says, "What does this mean?" He questions everything. His clothes catch fire on a candle. He wonders if fire is a good sign. Balzac is hilarious.

51 comments:

Ron said...

Voltaire used to do 40 a day...and Fredrick The Great made coffee with champagne! I would doubt if that were any good, but hey....

Milo Minderbinder said...

Go ahead, Gretchen, just try to quarantine this guy.

Fernandinande said...

There was a comic called "Too Much Coffee Man". It wasn't good.

Lucid-Ideas said...

I'll leave you with this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wj_AOzSSDMM


I don't care what he or anyone else says. That is not good for a human body.

narciso said...

that's way too much coffee, I might have a few shots of expresso, or one big coffee at the beginning of the day,

gspencer said...

We need to know what he calls a cup. That term varies, in practical usage. While a measured cup is of course 8 oz (= one-half of a pint), it's not unusual, for example in different eateries, for the actual ounces of a "cup" to be 4, 6, 8, even 12 ounces, and still be called a cup.

25 cups each 4oz is not an unusual amount of liquid (less than a gallon). 25 cups each 8oz each is a fair amount of liquid (about 1.5 gallons).


This issue is akin to resolving the Banya Issue: Was it a cup or a bowl? And did crackers figure into the equation?

Wince said...

The photos don’t show his teeth.

Howard said...

Tim Hortons isn't coffee.

wild chicken said...

It seems to be a cool Twitter trend to use a profile pic with coffee cup in face. I guess to cover it up. It's more flattering than the old mouth-agape shot.

Anyway. I wish I could drink that much coffee. I recall guys who would drink Pepsi all day long. Gah.

Howard said...

I think that whole "idea in a cup" meme was used by Christopher Hitchens to justify his Johnnie Walker Black and cigarette consumption.

Spiros said...

Some people refer to this as OCD or "obsessive coffee disorder."

rehajm said...

There's been so much back and forth on coffee- the swing from harm to benefit and back to harm. But these supposed over doees seem to come back every year...

...all I know is it's a great PED. Mostly legal, too..

Big Mike said...

I used to drink a great deal of coffee back when I was in my thirties and forties, though never 25 cups per day. But then I realized that my weekly Sunday splitting headaches were actually due to caffeine withdrawal since I didn’t drink as much at home, so I cut back to 3 cups per day. Just don’t try to deal with me before that first cup!

Lurker21 said...

I feel like Balzac. I used to fill two large Planters' Peanut jars with coffee and drink it when I was home. Now that I am home almost all the time I am emptying and refilling them almost everyday.

I doubt it amounts to 25 cups (unless maybe you are thinking tiny espresso cups) and it is decaf, but I do feel a profound spiritual affinity with Balzac. Especially when my bathrobe catches fire.

And I am certainly wearing a bathrobe all the time. My stomach lining is starting to feel a bit like poor old abandonded Père Goriot.

Ficta said...

Of course, I shouldn't tell you this but she advocates dirty books.
Dirty books?
Chaucer, Rabelais, BAL-ZAC.

stlcdr said...

Are we talking about a literal 'cup' as a measurement of ounces? And there's coffee, and then there's Cofffeeeee'!

NorthOfTheOneOhOne said...

I knew someone like that once. I'm pretty sure it was self-medication for undiagnosed Attention Deficit Disorder.

Alan said...

Well, my grandmother, who lived to be 89, drank 24 cups a day, but they were pretty small and, if I remember right, weak. I think she did it in part because she was diabetic and got to drink something sweet by putting saccharine in her coffee.

JML said...

I usually have around 20 Ounces of coffee in the morning, made with 6 TSPs of grinds. It is pretty strong. I drink Mystic Monk, usually Brazil or Ethiopian and on occasion one of their blends. I may have a second cup in the winter or on days off. Note: I'm now retired so even day is a day off. I also have a small Nespresso machine and I'll have a cafe au lait on occasion, or a decaf lungo anytime after 2PM. No coffee after 2 PM except for that occasional lungo. I don't know if it gives me brilliant ideas, but it did help to keep me from killing employees when I worked.

Yancey Ward said...

I once drank five cups in a morning not long after I started drinking coffee as a young man. Never again- scared the shit out of me. One in the morning, and sometimes one in the afternoon (but not too often).

I suspect Anderson is someone who has built up high resistance to the effects of caffeine.

MadisonMan said...

The obvious Link, although the captioning bugs me.

WWIII Joe Biden, Husk-Puppet + America's Putin said...

8:19 - Lucid

Yikes.

Hint for coffee drinking in the AM. When you get up, you are dehydrated. Drink some water and juice first thing- Then, have your coffee. Remember to drink water after coffee as well, so your body isn't in a state of dehydration.
Dr. BleachBit has spoken.

Psota said...

A friend of mine once came down with a case of kidney stones.
The doctor said to him, "you drink a lot of coffee, don't you?"

traditionalguy said...

Khalua and Coffee sounds best. Be best.

Nancy said...

@JML: 20 oz made with 6 tsps? OMG! I hope you mean 6 TBSP and even that is pretty weak!

Mattman26 said...

Balzac is likewise hilarious because it sounds so much like ball-sack.

Wilbur said...

I have a caffeine pill (a generic form of Vivarin) with a bottle of water when I awake in the morning. I don't have to wait for coffee to brew, and it doesn't stain my teeth.

Lurker21 said...

I complete the circle by citing Woody Allen's post-coital line: "As Balzac said, There goes another novel." If there was a novel in every cup, it may not have been coffee that old Honoré was talking about. It certainly isn't what Woody is talking about.

JMW Turner said...

When I was younger, I would start the day with three cups of black as midnight coffee, followed by more of the same at my desk all during the day at work. Actually, I have been guzzling java juice in copious quantities since I was twelve. Now, moving into my septemgenarian years, I've backed off chain drinking, made possible by the miracle of
single cup Kureg technology. Ah,progress!.

tcrosse said...

My grandmother, who lived to be 97, would drink coffee straight out of the percolator. She'd put the spout up to her lips, and glug glug glug.

YoungHegelian said...

I've known a couple of people who actually drank a cup of coffee (regular, not decaf!) before they go to bed. How that works, I don't know, but they do.

I'm actually much more of a tea man myself, but my wife got me into coffee a lot more, mostly as a social moment we could share together.

Whiskeybum said...

You know the best way to have an Irish coffee? Skip the coffee and have the whiskey straight!

Bill Peschel said...

We all have different tolerances, coffee included. I have about 2.5 big cups (my wife shares the first cup with me in bed; so civilized!), and maybe a cup of tea after that. Otherwise, I can't fall asleep easily, and I'm at an age where I have to sleep.

It's not physically impossible to drink 25 a day, but I doubt it's good for his heart, no matter what he says.

So, does he have good ideas? Or does his feed consist solely of selfies of him drinking?

Speaking of retired writers, let me throw in a link to this article that showed up yesterday. When Philip Roth retired from writing, he didn't stop writing.

Scott said...

Army days; 25 cups was a lot but not uncommon. The real go-getters were the guys who had a cup of coffee in one hand, a cigarette in the other, and a dip going almost continuously.

The other "stay energized" method demonstrated by one of my lieutenants was eating instant coffee out of the jar with a spoon.

khematite said...

Presaged by Ella Mae Morse's 1953 hit "40 Cups of Coffee":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMcdzc1TkO4

buwaya said...

I'm usually at 4-6 cups a day. Or mugs, which would be about 2 cups, no?
So 8-12 cups I guess. I go through a lot of coffee.

They help me sleep, for one thing.

This fellow is not that far out of the ordinary.

Francisco D said...

YoungHegelian said...I've known a couple of people who actually drank a cup of coffee (regular, not decaf!) before they go to bed.

My Norwegian grandparents did that every night. A lot of Scandinavian farmers did that. However, the brew was pretty weak.

Old Norwegians drink their coffee black because they are taught that it is imposing to ask a host for cream and sugar.

Ann Althouse said...

"We need to know what he calls a cup. That term varies, in practical usage. While a measured cup is of course 8 oz (= one-half of a pint), it's not unusual, for example in different eateries, for the actual ounces of a "cup" to be 4, 6, 8, even 12 ounces, and still be called a cup."

The classic coffee cup -- like the one on the Maxwell House label (spilling out the last drop) -- is 4 ounces. 25 of those would fill about 8 ordinary mugs.

Ann Althouse said...

I'm assuming a mug holds 12 ounces... but the photographs show him drinking from a mug that's even bigger than that. I believe he really is drinking a mug and a half ever waking hour, like he says. Of course, he could be lying about the whole thing.

They say Trump drinks 12 Diet Cokes a day. Those are 12 oz.

Does diet soda help anyone lose weight? It's obviously not helping him... other than as a caffeine-delivery system. He's morbidly obese. Just kidding. He's obese.

Ann Althouse said...

"The other "stay energized" method demonstrated by one of my lieutenants was eating instant coffee out of the jar with a spoon."

The freeze-dried kind of instant coffee makes a tasty, crunchy topping for vanilla ice cream.

Howard said...

Had an ex-Navy client who claimed the coffee they drank was like crankcase oil on the destroyer.

I buy cheap store brand coffee and cold Brew it over night. 1:1 dilute with water and warm up in the wave. Silky Smoove and Strong. 16 to 24 ounces per day. Then it's 12 to 24 ounces of half caff cold Brew tea (spiced chai and apple cinnamon) supplimented with glycerin minerals key lime juice and ascorbic acid.

Howie's helpful health hints

Jim at said...

I doubt I've had 25 cups of coffee in my lifetime.

Whiskeybum said...

"Does diet soda help anyone lose weight?"

Drinking diet soda does not make anyone loose weight. It only has the role of allowing you to have a soda that does not add calories to your diet, which would otherwise cause you to potentially gain weight.

KellyM said...

Of course, then there's Fry on 300 cups of coffee....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfvpeVe_i1A

rcocean said...

Used to drink coffee all day to get through all the work. Now I stop at 12 noon. Nothing better than a hot cup of coffee on a cold morning.

rcocean said...

After dinner coffee used to be a thing. With Dessert. Never could understand it, but my parents did it all the time.

The Cracker Emcee Refulgent said...

Good God. Considering the way the IT guys can turn a company bathroom into a noxious wasteland, I bet this guy could keep even the homeless out of Starbucks.

The Cracker Emcee Refulgent said...

“I've known a couple of people who actually drank a cup of coffee (regular, not decaf!) before they go to bed. How that works, I don't know, but they do.”

That’s how true addiction works, my friend. How nicotine has become both a stimulant and a relaxant for me. A wonder drug for certain.

Marcus Bressler said...

Robert Wolke, a chemist and an author of some note ("What Einstein told his Chef (Barber, et cetera)) writes that while a diuretic, coffee does not have a negative effect on your body's hydration. Simply said, if you were dying of dehydration, you could save your life by drinking just coffee.

THEOLDMAN

DavidUW said...

I drink 48 oz of coffee every morning made with about 1/4 to 1/3 lb of coffee beans. Followed by an espresso around 9-10 am
I wake up at 4 am however.


Charlie said...

"You'll find it in Balzac"

"Excuse me for living but I never read him".