Which drinks have the most, and least, caffeine?

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A friend and I were recently debating how much caffeine is in various drinks. I felt like my hands were tied behind my back, since I had no graphs to show them. Of course, the first thing I did when I got to work was create some caffeine graphs! They turned out pretty interesting, so I thought I'd share them with you...

I found a really informative website called caffeineinformer.com that provides detailed data on many different kinds of drinks. I downloaded the data for soda, tea, and coffee by copy-n-pasting them into Excel spreadsheets, and then using Proc Import to read the data into SAS datasets.

Each category still had a few too many drinks to quickly get a mental grasp on (typically 100+), so I took a two-stage approach -- first I plotted just the handful of drinks in each category that I recognized and/or might drink, and then I plotted the entire list. I'm including images of the small subset graphs below, and you can click them to see the graphs of all the drinks in each category:

Graph of how much caffeine is in various sodas.

Graph of how much caffeine is in various teas.

Graph of how much caffeine is in various coffees.

I'm not usually a big fan of embellishing graphs with things like artwork or dancing bologna. But in this case I decided to add a simple image in each graph, to let help the user quickly distinguish between them (a glass of soda, a glass of ice tea, and a cup of coffee).

So, how did your favorite drinks fare in this comparison? Did they have more, or less, caffeine than you thought? (And what do you think about the images added to the graphs - do they help, or distract?)

 

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About Author

Robert Allison

The Graph Guy!

Robert has worked at SAS for over a quarter century, and his specialty is customizing graphs and maps - adding those little extra touches that help them answer your questions at a glance. His educational background is in Computer Science, and he holds a BS, MS, and PhD from NC State University.

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8 Comments

  1. Pingback: My top 10 graph blog posts of 2016! - SAS Learning Post

    • Robert Allison
      Robert Allison on

      Thanks! ... And for a second there, I thought I remembered an old coffee commercial where they called their coffee "the eye opener" - but then when I Googled it, I guess it was Coast Soap, rather than coffee! ;)

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