The One Thing You'll Never Catch James Bond Drinking
You've seen James Bond sip martinis onscreen, and you know how he likes them: "Shaken, not stirred." In his globe-trotting adventures, he's also been known to knock back 50-year-old Macallan Scotch whiskey, among other things. But did you know that Bond, much like Ted Lasso, hates tea?
This might seem counter-intuitive, given that tea and Bond are both emblems of British culture, whereas Ted Lasso is an American football coach who came to England to coach soccer. However, if you dig back into Ian Fleming's original Bond novels — the source material for the many 007 movies that followed — it becomes clear that there's no love lost between Bond and tea. In "Goldfinger" (by way of Huffington Post), the secret agent even goes so far as to say:
"I don't drink tea. I hate it. It's mud. Moreover it's one of the main reasons for the downfall of the British Empire."
In "Thunderball," Fleming writes, "Bond loathed and despised tea, that flat, soft, time-wasting opium of the masses." Bond is forced to drink it at a health clinic, but as his appearances in other books and movies have shown, he much prefers coffee to tea.
A Toast to Bond the Coffee-Drinker
Japan has a tea culture not unlike that of Britain, and Huffington Post notes that it's the only other place besides that health clinic where Bond drinks tea. This makes 007 the inverse of Tommy Lee Jones, who is all about doubling up on canned coffee of the Boss variety in his guise as Alien Jones in Japan.
In London and in France, Bond also goes for two cups of joe. In the U.S., he drinks espressos, while in Irish airports, he drinks Irish coffee. He's also had iced coffee while road-tripping with Felix Leiter, most recently portrayed by Jeffrey Wright in the Daniel Craig Bond movies.
Fun fact: Fleming had a house named Goldeneye on the island of Jamaica, which may be why he has Bond drink Blue Mountain coffee at one point, too. The movies don't depict Bond imbibing coffee as much as he does in the books, but in "From Russia with Love," Sean Connery does order a medium sweet coffee.
With Craig officially vacating the role of Bond after "No Time to Die," you can pour one out with him by mixing a Vesper (as seen in "Casino Royale"), or you can always just brew a pot of coffee. It seems like a secret agent might benefit from having a good caffeine jolt every now and then.