How many cups of tea are drunk worldwide each day?

How to get close to this number

Anchor on coffee and adjust upward. This site's companion question puts global coffee at a couple of billion cups a day; tea is drunk across the most populous countries on Earth, where coffee is not the default, so it has to be higher. Comparing two quantities in the same category is more reliable than estimating either alone.

The claim in the explanation is the one that resets people's sense of scale: tea is the most consumed drink after water, ahead of coffee, beer and soft drinks combined. Anyone in a coffee-drinking country will underestimate this badly, because the countries that dominate the total are the ones with the largest populations rather than the loudest café cultures.

And the per-capita leader is not the country everyone names. As the explanation says, it is Turkey rather than Britain, by a wide margin. National reputation and national consumption are only loosely related, which is a pattern worth noticing across every food and drink question on this site.