Wake up and smell the world’s largest coffee: 2,010 gallons

You may want to think twice before saying “Super-size me” around Ryan Abood: He and his crew of 15 recently entered Guinness World Records by brewing up a 2,010-gallon cup of coffee, enough to keep even the most dedicated java-chugger awake nights.

Abood, CEO of GourmetGiftBaskets.com, had already entered the hallowed pages of Guinness by fashioning the world’s biggest cupcake, but he was looking for a new challenge. Reading that Americans gulp down some 146 billion cups of coffee a year, he set about to make a little caffeinated history.

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Not shy about a challenge, Abood admits he scoffed when learning the world record for Largest Cup of Coffee was 911 gallons. “[I thought] ‘Now, this is going to be an easy one to break,’ ” Abood told PR Newswire.

Abood brought his staff to the Blog World Expo at the Mandalay Resort and Casino in Las Vegas on Oct. 15, and set about the task. The Boston-based Terracon Corp. built a storage tank for the joe, and Georgia-based Chisel Productions fashioned a coffee cup out of foam and polyurethane to go around the tank.

Around 4 a.m., the Gourmet Gift Basket Team fired up coffeemakers the size of refrigerators, supplied by the Bunn-O-Matic Corporation, and then fed a pair of long hoses into the 8-by-8-foot coffee cup. Around three gallons of Colombian Arabica blend coffee a minute poured into the oversize-and-then-some cup, and by 8 a.m., the previous record was roast — er, toast.

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Still, the team wasn’t satisfied: They kept pouring until noon, when they passed the 2,000-gallon mark. That’s the equivalent of 32,160 ordinary cups of coffee, which by Starbucks prices would set a customer back a couple of hundred grand.

Shortly after 12, a Guinness representative officially confirmed Abood and his crew had entered

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the records.

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Have an ice day
The team rested on its laurels, but only for a day: Abood discovered that Guinness also logs a record for the biggest cup of iced coffee, and it was game on again.

Maybe Abood needs to switch to decaf. “We wanted to break both records, because we had this massive cup and we’d be crazy not to,” he explained. “We had all the tools necessary and loved the challenge.”

Making a record-breaking iced coffee proved a little trickier. The Gourmet team employed the same method used to make the hot coffee, but by Guinness rules, the coffee’s temperature had to sink below 45 degrees to be considered iced coffee.

Related: Sweet! World’s largest chocolate bar weighs nearly 5 tons

Thus, after filling the cup, the team dumped in 3,500 pounds of block ice to cool the coffee — and it required dumping out 100 gallons to make room for the ice. It took an entire day to accomplish, but Guinness stuck a thermometer into the brew and judged it another world’s record, just as the expo doors were closing.

Proceeds from the brewing bonanza went to benefit Susan G. Komen for the Cure, the world’s largest breast cancer foundation.