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.
Start here →AI-generated photograph · image policy
Every fall, somebody asks a version of the same question in the comments here: is Pumpkin Spice Latte season just off-limits once you’ve cut caffeine, or is there an actual way to keep the drink? It’s a fair thing to wonder, because the PSL reads like it sh...
Most of the coffee substitutes we cover on this site are still sitting on a grocery shelf somewhere — chicory, roasted barley, dandelion root. Sassafras is t...
A reader wrote in last month after a genuinely unsettling appointment: her son’s psychiatrist asked, almost in passing, whether he’d had any caffeine that mo...
Almost every trying-to-conceive checklist tells you to “cut back on caffeine.” Almost none of them tell you to how much, by when, or whether it applies to a ...
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...
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...
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 ...
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.
No email list yet — we'd rather not take your address until we can actually use it. New articles go out on the RSS feed.