Several common beverages can raise your blood pressure, some within minutes and others over months of regular consumption. Coffee, energy drinks, alcohol, sugary drinks, and even certain herbal teas all have measurable effects on blood pressure through different mechanisms. The size of the increase depends on the drink, the amount, and how often you consume it.
Coffee and Caffeinated Drinks
Caffeine is the most widely consumed substance that acutely raises blood pressure. If you don’t drink coffee regularly, a standard cup can push your systolic pressure (the top number) up by 5 to 10 points. This spike typically happens within 30 to 120 minutes of drinking it and is temporary, fading as your body processes the caffeine.
People who drink coffee daily tend to develop a tolerance, meaning their blood pressure response becomes smaller over time. But if you’re not a regular coffee drinker, or you’ve been told your blood pressure is already elevated, even that temporary spike matters. You can test your own sensitivity by checking your blood pressure before a cup of coffee and again about an hour later. A jump of 5 to 10 points suggests you’re responsive to caffeine’s effects.
Tea, cola, and pre-workout supplements also contain enough caffeine to produce similar short-term increases, though the dose per serving varies widely. A cup of green tea has roughly a third the caffeine of brewed coffee, so the effect is proportionally smaller.
Energy Drinks
Energy drinks deserve their own category because they do more than just deliver caffeine. A single 32-ounce can of a popular energy drink contains 304 to 320 milligrams of caffeine, roughly the equivalent of three cups of coffee consumed at once. On top of that, these drinks contain a mix of other active ingredients: taurine, guarana, ginseng, glucuronolactone, and carnitine, depending on the brand.
A randomized trial published in the Journal of the American Heart Association found that while caffeine accounts for most of the blood pressure increase, the other ingredients in energy drinks appear to have additional effects on the cardiovascular system. Interestingly, taurine taken on its own has been shown to lower blood pressure in people with slightly elevated readings, but its interaction with high-dose caffeine in an energy drink creates a different physiological picture. The combination of ingredients, the sheer caffeine load, and the speed at which most people drink them makes energy drinks one of the most potent blood-pressure-raising beverages available over the counter.
Alcohol
Alcohol raises blood pressure both acutely and chronically, and the chronic effect is the more concerning one. A large meta-analysis of 22 cohort studies found a clear linear relationship between alcohol consumption and the risk of developing hypertension once intake exceeds about 12 grams of alcohol per day. That’s roughly one standard drink: a 12-ounce beer, a 5-ounce glass of wine, or a 1.5-ounce shot of spirits.
For women, the data showed no increased hypertension risk below that 12-gram threshold, with risk climbing at higher amounts. For men, the association was similarly dose-dependent. This means that even moderate drinking, if it consistently exceeds one drink per day, raises your long-term odds of developing high blood pressure. The American Heart Association’s position is straightforward: if you don’t drink, don’t start, and if you do drink, keep it limited.
Alcohol raises pressure through multiple routes. It activates stress hormones, increases fluid retention, and over time can stiffen blood vessel walls. Binge drinking is particularly harmful because it produces large, repeated spikes that stress the cardiovascular system even in people whose average weekly intake seems modest.
Sugar-Sweetened Beverages
Sodas, fruit punches, sweetened iced teas, and other drinks loaded with added sugar raise blood pressure through a less obvious pathway: fructose metabolism. When your liver processes large amounts of fructose, it burns through cellular energy rapidly. A byproduct of that energy depletion is uric acid, which enters the bloodstream and interferes with the production of nitric oxide, a molecule that keeps blood vessels relaxed and flexible. Less nitric oxide means stiffer arteries and higher pressure.
This isn’t about the small amount of fructose in a piece of fruit. It’s about the concentrated doses found in a 20-ounce soda or a large sweetened coffee drink, consumed repeatedly over weeks and months. The effect is cumulative. Regular intake of sugar-sweetened beverages is linked to higher blood pressure in both adults and adolescents, independent of weight gain, though the weight gain that often accompanies heavy soda consumption compounds the problem.
Sports and Electrolyte Drinks
Sports drinks are designed to replace what you lose in sweat, which includes sodium. A typical 12-ounce serving of a popular sports drink contains around 150 to 300 milligrams of sodium, plus about 5 teaspoons of sugar. If you’re exercising intensely in the heat, that sodium replacement is useful. If you’re sipping a sports drink at your desk or with lunch, you’re adding sodium your body doesn’t need.
The American Heart Association recommends no more than 2,300 milligrams of sodium per day, with an ideal target of 1,500 milligrams for most adults. A couple of sports drinks on top of a normal diet can easily push you past those limits. Excess sodium causes your body to retain water, which increases blood volume and forces your heart to pump harder. For people already managing high blood pressure, or those on blood pressure medication, the extra sodium in electrolyte drinks can work against their treatment.
Licorice Root Tea
This one surprises most people. Licorice root tea, sold in health food stores and often marketed as a soothing herbal remedy, contains a compound called glycyrrhizic acid that mimics the hormone aldosterone. Aldosterone tells your kidneys to hold onto sodium and excrete potassium, which raises blood pressure. Drinking licorice tea regularly creates a state that effectively tricks your body into acting as though it’s overproducing this hormone.
The lowest dose shown to cause adverse effects is 100 milligrams of glycyrrhizic acid per day. A single cup of strong licorice tea can contain that amount or more, depending on preparation. Cases of dangerously high blood pressure from regular licorice tea consumption are well documented in medical literature, sometimes in people who had no idea their “healthy” tea habit was the cause. If you drink licorice root tea daily and have unexplained high blood pressure, this is worth investigating.
What About Milk and Dairy Drinks
Full-fat milk and dairy-based smoothies are sometimes flagged as blood pressure concerns because of their saturated fat content. But the evidence doesn’t support this worry. A 2023 review of studies involving more than 1,400 participants found little evidence that higher dairy intake, including full-fat dairy, increased blood pressure or cholesterol. Dairy drinks appear to be neutral or, in some studies of low-fat dairy, mildly beneficial for blood pressure due to their calcium, potassium, and protein content.
How These Effects Add Up
Most people don’t drink just one type of beverage in a day. A morning coffee, an energy drink in the afternoon, a soda with dinner, and a couple of beers in the evening collectively deliver caffeine, sugar, sodium, and alcohol in doses that individually might seem modest but together create a sustained elevation in blood pressure. The acute spikes from caffeine and the chronic damage from alcohol and sugar-sweetened drinks operate on different timelines but compound each other’s effects.
If your blood pressure is already in the elevated range (120 to 129 systolic), swapping out even one or two of these beverages for water, unsweetened tea, or plain coffee in smaller amounts can make a measurable difference. The drinks you consume daily are one of the few blood pressure variables you have complete control over.