Coffee overtakes wine as second most popular drink in the world

These harsher economic times are seeing people searching for low-cost ways to socialise, pushing coffee to the top shelf of the world’s most popular drinks.

With one billion cups of coffee sold in Australia in 2011, it has overtaken wine to become the second most popular drink in the world, behind water.

Queensland coffee entrepreneur Phillip Di Bella, the founder said the sales of coffee over the past year showed our taste for the beverage was stronger than ever.

“The evolving coffee culture in Australia also proves that drinking coffee can be just as sociable as having a couple of glasses of wine, and you don’t wake up with a headache or a hangover the next day.”

Di Bella Coffee sells an average of 100 million cups of coffee per annum, contributing to approximately 10 per cent of the estimated 1 billion-cups-a-year Australian coffee market.