Getting started
Can you drink coffee before a fasting blood test? Even black coffee can nudge your glucose
The short answer
Independent editorial · since 2025
Your honest guide to life beyond coffee.
Mushroom coffees, chicory, herbal roasts, matcha, and everything people try when regular coffee stops working for them. We test every drink, read the studies, and won't tell you your favorite brand is best if it isn't.
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Health
Does coffee cause gout? The research points the other way, and decaf shows the same pattern
If you have gout, or a parent who does, someone has probably told you to cut back on coffee. I wanted to see whether that advice rests on anything. I read fi...
Ingredients
What is cascara? The dried coffee-cherry husk that brews like fruit tea, and the caffeine catch
Most coffee alternatives try to taste like coffee. Cascara doesn’t try. It is the fruit that grows around the coffee bean, dried and steeped like tea, and it...
Getting started
Caffeine before a sleep study: the cutoff is earlier than you'd guess, and there's an honest reason not to cheat
If you’ve been booked for an overnight sleep study, the prep sheet probably has a line that makes a daily coffee drinker wince: no caffeine after a certain t...
Recent reviews
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Reviews
Teeccino French Roast review: the closest-to-coffee herbal coffee we've tried
I have reviewed a lot of herbal coffees. Most of them disappoint in the same way: they’re reasonable herbal drinks, but they taste nothing like coffee, and m...
Reviews
Ryze Mushroom Coffee review: lower caffeine, real mushrooms, fair price
Ryze is currently the best-selling direct-to-consumer mushroom coffee in the US. It’s worth evaluating on its own terms rather than on the marketing-adjacent...
Reviews
MUD\WTR Rise review: the best-tasting mushroom coffee we've tried
We tested MUD\WTR Rise against three other mushroom coffees (Ryze, Four Sigmatic, Om) in a blind taste panel. MUD\WTR won on taste by a clear margin. It was ...
Why we write this site
Most of us end up on a coffee-alternatives search because something changed: a bad night of sleep, a new medication, a pregnancy, a health scare, or just the creeping sense that the fourth cup isn't doing what the first one used to. The web has plenty of listicles selling the alternatives — far fewer that help you understand them.
We write for the reader in the middle of it: tired, curious, a little skeptical, looking for someone who's actually tried the thing and can say whether it lives up to the claims. We include the products we think are worth trying, we disclose the ones we earn a commission on, and we never rank something first because of a payout.
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