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 →If you’ve followed this series through roasted soybean and lupin, you already know the plot: take a humble legume, roast it dark until it turns toasty and co...
Every July I stop wanting to drink my coffee alternative and start wanting to eat it. When the afternoon hits triple digits, even a tall glass of iced chicor...
There’s a small, common assumption tucked inside the word “decaf” — that the caffeine has been taken out, full stop, and what’s left is a coffee you can drin...
There’s a specific kind of decision fatigue that happens in front of a gas-station cooler at 3pm. You want something cold and a little bit special — not wate...
A reader named Priyanka left a comment on my piece about staying caffeine-free at the office that I couldn’t stop thinking about. She said the office version...
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.