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 →A patient brought her two-week-old to a visit recently and asked, almost apologetically, whether she had to give up her morning cup entirely now that she was...
A reader emailed last month asking what to make of the small bag of “honeybush” her aunt had brought back from Cape Town. The aunt’s pitch had been character...
Every May we get a wave of the same email: it is warming up, the reader has happily given up coffee, and now they want a cold-brew version of whatever they h...
Of all the questions readers send me, “should I switch from coffee to matcha?” is the one I most consistently answer with another question: what part of coff...
The first morning I quit coffee, I sat at my kitchen counter at 6:40 a.m. waiting for the version of myself that opens the laptop and starts doing things, an...
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.