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Sept. 29 is National Coffee Day. While the country is celebrating with plenty of coffee deals, we prefer to remember some of our favorite coffee-loving characters. Few shows highlight a character’s love of coffee quite like Gilmore Girls, so we’ve collected three of the show’s very best moments involving a cup of joe. While we’ve selected just three, there are plenty more Gilmore Girls coffee moments. 

Lorelai Gilmore writing a horoscope just to get a cup of coffee is a perfect ‘Gilmore Girls’ coffee moment

By the time Gilmore Girls fans connected with Rory and Lorelai Gilmore, their relationship with Luke Danes was well-established. In the pilot episode, it was obvious that the mother-daughter duo spent a lot of time at Luke’s Diner. In a season 5 episode, fans found out just how Lorelai and Luke established their rapport and the lengths that Lorelai would go to for a cup of coffee. 

During their first official date, Luke recalled Lorelai coming into his diner demanding a cup of coffee for the first time. After he told her she had to wait, Luke recalled that in a desperate bid for attention, Lorelai jotted down a horoscope on a piece of paper stating that Luke would meet an annoying woman, and if he gave her coffee, she would go away. Luke presented the horoscope that he had kept in his wallet for years. Lorelai simply replied, “Boy! I’ll say anything for a cup of coffee.” Not only was it a perfect Gilmore Girls coffee moment, but it remains one of the best Luke and Lorelai moments of the entire series. 

Lorelai once cheated on Luke’s coffee, and she didn’t hate it

Luke and Lorelai’s relationship wasn’t always smooth sailing. When the couple broke up in season 5 of Gilmore Girls, Lorelai stopped going to Luke’s Diner for breakfast. The busy business owner needed to find her caffeine fix, and coffee at home simply wasn’t getting the job done. Eventually, she settled on Weston’s, a local bakery offering high-end coffee concoctions. 

After a bumpy start, Lorelai settled in with their more upscale offerings. She liked them so much that she didn’t immediately give them up when she reconnected with Luke. She was even bold enough to bring an “enemy coffee cup” into Luke’s Diner. She explained the betrayal to him as a passing fling. Technically, she didn’t even consider it coffee. She told her beau, “This is not coffee. This is a mocha chocolate caramel swirl-a-chino with extra whipped cream.”

Rory Gilmore was just as addicted to coffee as her mother

Rory loved coffee, too, but Gilmore Girls coffee moments involving her were a bit more spread out. Still, she had a few. In season 6, Rory opted to return to Yale. Before she could begin classes again, she had to meet with a psychologist to check-in. While Rory insisted it was just a “formality,” she learned she needed the psychologist’s help when she completely unraveled over her breakup and the possibility of not being able to obtain her beloved coffee. 

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Rory Gilmore’s desperate season 6 realization that the coffee cart at Yale could be off-limits after her breakup with Logan Huntzberger truly highlights how Lorelai passed her love of coffee on to her daughter. To be fair, Rory was unraveling over her breakup with Logan before the realization, but the fact that she might need to give up coffee really pushed her over the edge. She sobbed in the psychologist’s office, “I don’t know what I’m going to do. I don’t think I can take running into him every day in the halls, and in the paper and the coffee cart… Oh my god! I’m going to have to quit drinking coffee! And I love coffee!”

It all worked out in the end, though. Rory and Logan got back together, and she was free to visit the coffee cart as often as she wanted. Gilmore Girls fans never heard from the psychologist again, either. 

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