Why do academics drink so much coffee? A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems -- Alfréd Rényi


All the universities whose staff lounges I've been to have had coffee machines with free coffee. I've seen groups name their meetings after coffee much more than other beverages (e.g. from Google, "AstroCoffee" exists in OSU, IfA Hawaii and Goethe University; a corresponding search for "AstroTea" turns up nothing). I've also witnessed one academic telling another "I'm stuck, don't know what to do next" and the other say, quite seriously, "have some coffee! If you're still stuck, have even more coffee!"

What is it about coffee that makes it so ubiquitous in academic culture?
Academics sure do drink a lot of coffee---but do they drink any more coffee than other professionals?  

According to Wikipedia, 150 million Americans adults drink coffee daily (out of about 240 million total), a rate of more than 60%.  So if most adults drink coffee in America, it's entirely unsurprising that academics are like most other adults and that departments might happily supply this cheap perk---just like many, many other offices do.  Similarly high rates of consumption appear to pertain in most other developed Western countries, which are also where the majority of high-impact scientific research is still conducted.

In short: many academics appear to drink a lot of coffee simply because they are typical adults in societies where most people drink a lot of coffee.