Browse everything we've written — newest first.
Finals are the one stretch of the year when every reason to quit caffeine and every reason not to show up together. You’re jittery, sleeping badly, and drink...
“Subscribe and save” shows up on almost every coffee-alternative product page in this category, and it’s easy to click through without reading past the perce...
A reader who’d already worked through the dalgona piece wrote in asking about a different whipped coffee entirely — the Vietnamese one, with the egg. It’s a ...
Most of the ingredients on this site earn their “coffee substitute” label from a root or a grain — chicory, dandelion, barley. Okra seed coffee earns it from...
A reader emailed after her psychiatrist mentioned, almost as an aside, that her new prescription might make her “feel her coffee more than usual.” She asked ...
Most advice about quitting caffeine assumes a life where you control your own bedtime. Airline pilots don’t have that life. You have a federal rule that hand...
“Caffeine-free” and “gluten-free” get treated like the same kind of claim in this aisle, and they aren’t. We’ve already checked this shelf for FODMAPs; this ...
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 ...
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 ...
Ask a search engine “what coffee won’t give me heartburn” and it will hand you a small industry’s worth of “low-acid” beans, all claiming their gentler pH me...
A reader emailed after the dalgona piece with a version of the same question, aimed at a very different drink: does a caffeine-free Irish coffee actually wor...
If you’ve spent any time on this site, you’ve already met chicory. It’s the backbone of our herbal coffee roundup, the subject of a blood-sugar deep dive, an...
You felt it mid-sip: a flutter, a thud, a beat that seemed to skip and land wrong. Your hand goes to your chest. You google “does caffeine cause heart palpit...
If you drive for a living, caffeine probably isn’t a preference. It’s equipment. And most of the advice aimed at people quitting caffeine assumes a life that...
A reader wrote in after reading our piece on why the afternoon crash hits some people harder than others, which mentions in passing that “pregnancy and certa...
Ask most parents what worries them about their teenager and caffeine, and they picture a coffee habit starting too early — a 16-year-old ordering a latte, ma...
A reader who tried the caffeine-free coffee jelly recipe asked a follow-up worth its own answer: does the same swap work for dalgona, the whipped-coffee drin...
Most of the plants in this category earned the word “coffee” in their name because someone, somewhere, roasted and brewed them as a substitute for the real t...
If you drink coffee or tea every day and you’re fasting for Ramadan this year, there’s a decent chance the first day or two isn’t going to be about hunger. I...
Someone in a hypothyroidism forum asks a version of this question every few weeks, usually right after they’ve made a change they were proud of: I switched f...
Chicory root’s whole reputation as a “gentle” coffee substitute rests on the same molecule that makes it a problem for a meaningful share of readers: inulin,...
A reader question that’s been sitting in our inbox since the cafe-orders piece went up, paraphrased: “Is there anything that’s actually a dessert, not a drin...
Every time someone eats a date, or a factory pits one for paste or packaged fruit, a hard little seed comes out and almost always gets thrown away. It happen...
I have a fairly routine outpatient procedure booked for three weeks from now — nothing dramatic, the kind of thing that comes with a pre-op packet and a list...
If you’re up at 2am with the sheets kicked off and the fan going, “does my coffee habit have anything to do with this” is a reasonable question to be asking ...
Fiona Whitlock in Calgary read our landed-cost piece and tried to do the arithmetic herself. She got as far as the teeccino.com checkout before the page told...
Danny Okonkwo, six years a barista in Leeds, left a comment on a piece about ordering caffeine-free abroad that pointed out something closer to home: the caf...
“2,000 mg proprietary mushroom blend.” “Full-spectrum mushroom extract.” “Real mushrooms, not mycelium.” Three products can carry some version of that langua...
Marguerite D. in Lyon read our piece on wholesale-to-retail chicory markups and wrote in with the one variable it had been fudging. We’d attributed the six-t...
Hassan Ibrahim left a comment from Cairo on last week’s Turkey, Balkans and North Africa piece that I flagged immediately as its own article rather than a re...
Owen Baptiste, in Port of Spain, has now sent us two ideas in a row, and this one landed the same day the curry-base piece went up. That piece worked out wha...
Ask a barista what roast a bag of beans is and they can hand you a number: an Agtron reading, a temperature curve, a crack time. Ask what roast degree a bag ...
A patient told me recently that she’d switched from drip coffee to a French press “because it’s healthier — less processed, less paper waste.” I understood t...
Our instant coffee alternatives ranking judged everything on dissolve quality and flavor, on the assumption you’re standing at a kitchen counter with a kettl...
Five days after the piece correcting my café assumptions went up, Deniz Aydin left a comment from Izmir that I’ve been thinking about since. His point was si...
Owen Baptiste, in Port of Spain, read the savoury-cooking piece and noticed the gap in it immediately. That piece worked out three physics – chili stays most...
Ten days ago, this site wrote about acrylamide — the compound with the eightfold EU benchmark gap between chicory and grain — and measured it in micrograms p...
Someone told me about this years ago like it was a magic trick — drink your coffee, then go straight to sleep for twenty minutes, and you wake up hit twice a...
Priyanka N. in Leeds read our cost-per-cup piece and found the hole in it within hours: every price in that table was the number on the seller’s page, which ...
Five weeks ago I wrote a sentence I was confident about: “a café almost certainly cannot give you a coffee-shaped drink without coffee in it.” A reader in Tu...
Hal Brennan, in Portland, Maine, left a comment on the espresso-powder baking piece that we couldn’t answer honestly in the reply box. Most of his espresso p...
A reader in Leeds, Priyanka Sundaram, left a comment on our mushroom-coffee caffeine piece that we couldn’t shake. We had written that US labelling asks almo...
A reader named Marisol wrote in after our piece on coffee, tea and iron with a sentence that has been sitting with me since: her haematologist was far more e...
RYZE answers this question on its own ingredients page, in five words, before anyone else gets a chance to spin it:
I want to start by narrowing this question, because it arrives as one question and it is actually three, and the three have completely different answers. Two...
Five days ago I published a piece arguing that avoiding coffee is the right move early and the wrong move forever, and that the failure mode nobody counts is...
There is a number in European food law that looks, at first glance, like an accusation against the ingredient this site writes about more than any other.
Every recipe on this site so far has been a drink or something you eat with a spoon. Lattes, chai, horchata, mochas, tiramisu, affogato, granita. All of them...
Someone asks me some version of this question almost every week, and it usually arrives already half-answered: I’ve cut out coffee because of my iron — herba...
We have now written about every shelf in this category. Instant powders. Pods and K-Cups. Cans and bottles. Grounds for a press or a pour-over. Liquid concen...
Last week I published a piece about going caffeine-free next to someone who still drinks coffee, and the advice at the centre of it was this: don’t remove th...
There is a drink that several hundred million Europeans have been raised on, that sits in ordinary supermarkets between the instant coffee and the cocoa, tha...
A few weeks ago I wrote up caffeine-free tiramisu, which is the hard one — a dessert where the espresso is load-bearing, where you have to think about egg sa...
Walk down the functional-drink aisle and count how many packages say the word cortisol. Mushroom coffees, evening blends, “stress support” lattes, adaptogen ...
We’ve now covered nearly every shelf in the caffeine-free aisle. Instant powders. Pods and K-Cups. Cans and bottles you grab and go. Brewable grounds for a p...
I’ve written about most of the places caffeine ambushes you. The office pot and the 3pm coffee run. The airport at 6am. The kitchen ten feet from your desk w...
Line up the caffeine-free roasts we’ve written about on this site — chicory, roasted barley, acorn, fig, chickpea, lupin, soybean, Postum — and a pattern sho...
Tiramisu is the dessert I get asked about most, and it’s the one I resisted writing up the longest. Every other classic has an easy caffeine-free route — you...
The most common thing I hear from people defending their afternoon coffee is some version of: “caffeine doesn’t affect my sleep — I’m out cold by eleven.”
There’s a reader we wrote this one for specifically: someone who already owns the gear. You’ve got a French press on the counter, or a V60 and a gooseneck ke...
Every guide to quitting caffeine — including some I’ve written — quietly assumes one thing: that you’re the one in charge of your sleep. Go to bed a little e...
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...
Most of the caffeine-free cups I write about have one clean origin story. Soybean coffee has three, running in parallel: a 19th-century European health-food ...
Every summer I get some version of the same disappointed message: “I switched to iced chicory coffee and it just tastes like brown water.” It’s one of the mo...
If you’ve ever tried to get a straight answer on caffeine and migraine, you’ve probably come away more confused than when you started. One source tells you c...
It usually starts at a café table. You’ve got a warm mug in front of you, and a small person across the table decides they would very much like one too — a r...
For a long time I thought quitting caffeine was a morning problem. You get past the first cup, you’re home free. Then I went back to a desk job, and I found ...
Almost every caffeine-free drink I write about can be bought in a bag. Acorn coffee is one of the few you can gather off the ground. Long before “coffee alte...
Of all the drinks people miss when they quit caffeine, the blended frozen one comes up the most in July. Not the hot cup, not even the plain iced coffee — th...
Most of what you’ll read on this site is a case against leaning on caffeine — the wrecked afternoons, the tolerance treadmill, the sleep you don’t realize yo...
There’s a question hiding inside a lot of the emails we get, and it isn’t usually asked directly: which coffee alternative tastes good without me having to s...
I can tell you the exact place my caffeine-free streak has come closest to ending, more than once. It isn’t a bad day at work or a rough night’s sleep. It’s ...
Most of the caffeine-free drinks I write about come with a European grandmother somewhere in the story. Fig coffee comes with a whole spa town. Long before “...
Every July I get the same message from readers who’ve just quit caffeine: what do I drink at 3pm when everyone else is getting an iced coffee? And every July...
“Coffee dehydrates you, so drink an extra glass of water for every cup.” You have almost certainly heard some version of that, probably delivered with total ...
When the weather turns, the coffee-alternative question changes with it. The chicory brew you loved hot in January can taste thin and sad poured over ice in ...
I want to be honest about how this happened, because the internet version of quitting caffeine is a clean line — you stop, it’s hard for a week, and then you...
When I wrote about barley coffee — Italy’s caffè d’orzo — I mentioned in passing that the same grain shows up halfway around the world in a completely differ...
Chai is the drink I get asked about most by people who’ve just cut caffeine, and it’s the one where the disappointment runs deepest. They assume that because...
Most of the caffeine-free drinks I write about arrive with either a marketing budget or a European grandmother. Ramón seed has neither. It comes out of the t...
Every few months a headline reminds you that coffee raises your blood pressure, and every few months another one tells you coffee is good for your heart. Bot...
Most coffee-alternative guides assume you drink your cup long and milky. But there’s a specific reader we hear from less often and serve worse: the one who o...
I used to think my afternoon was just like that. A good morning, a productive run until about 1pm, and then a wall — that heavy, can’t-focus, why-is-everythi...
Long before mushroom lattes and adaptogen blends, before chicory had a moment and matcha had an Instagram account, America already had its coffee alternative...
Most of the caffeine-free drinks I develop are trying to stand in for coffee. Hot chocolate isn’t, and that’s why it’s such a relief to make. Nobody sips a m...
Every few weeks someone forwards me the same claim, usually with an exclamation point: chocolate doesn’t have caffeine, it has theobromine, and theobromine i...
There’s a specific frustration we hear constantly from readers leaving coffee: they own a Keurig, they don’t want to abandon it, and the pod aisle is almost ...
The first time I quit caffeine, I braced for the headache. Everybody warns you about the headache. Three days of feeling like someone parked a car on my fore...
The roasted, caffeine-free cup has a surprising amount of variety once you start looking. There’s the roasted root tier — chicory, dandelion, carob. There’s ...
Most caffeine-free warm drinks are imitating coffee. Chicory, roasted barley, dandelion — they’re all trying, more or less convincingly, to give you back the...
There’s a particular reader we think about a lot: someone who has decided to get off coffee but who is never, realistically, going to stand at the stove with...
A reader emailed me a screenshot of a supplement label — caffeine and L-theanine, in a tidy 1:2 ratio — and asked the question I get more than almost any oth...
I am not a shift worker, but I’ve spent a strange amount of my life trying to sleep when the sun was up. Red-eye recovery. The summer I worked a 4am bakery p...
Most of the caffeine-free drinks I write about are New World plants or wellness-aisle newcomers — chicory, rooibos, the mushroom blends. Barley coffee is nei...
A mocha is the drink people miss most when they leave coffee. Not the plain cup — the mocha. It’s the one that feels like a treat, the one you ordered when y...
A patient in her second trimester asked me this one recently, and she asked it the way a lot of people do — already half-relieved, because a wellness article...
We get a particular kind of email more than any other: someone has decided to quit coffee, they want to start tonight, and they don’t want to wait two days f...
A couple of weeks ago a reader named Marco left a comment on my piece about waking up without coffee. He’s a rotating shift worker — nights and days, on what...
I came to carob sideways. A recipe-testing client wanted a hot chocolate their evening-sensitive customers could drink at 9pm without lying awake, and cocoa ...
If you’ve cut back on coffee and then found yourself lying awake after an evening square of 85 percent dark, you’ve probably wondered the obvious thing: how ...
Two roots keep showing up at the top of every “what can I drink instead of coffee” list: chicory and dandelion. They look almost identical in the mug — dark,...
A few weeks ago I wrote a day-by-day log of my first two weeks off caffeine. I ended it on day 16, said the trade was worth it, and promised — mostly to myse...
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...
A friend asked me at dinner last weekend whether rooibos really had zero caffeine, or whether that was one of those things people say that turns out to have ...
This is the second time I’ve done fourteen days off caffeine. The first time was eighteen months ago and lasted nine months. This one started two Mondays bac...
I make a hot drink every winter morning and an iced drink every summer afternoon. The hot one I can wing — chicory in a French press, splash of milk, done. T...
Patients ask me a version of this question every week. They are on a 16:8 or an 18:6 schedule, they have figured out that plain coffee is fine, and they want...
Every few weeks a reader emails us some version of the same question: “I’m trying to quit coffee — should I get Teeccino or Dandy Blend?” Both names come up ...
A patient asked me last week whether dandelion root coffee would “reset her liver” after a stressful work trip. I told her what I tell most people who ask me...
A friend of mine started drinking yerba mate last fall on the recommendation of a trainer who told her it had “more caffeine than coffee but cleaner.” She la...
About a third of the patients who come to me asking for “a nutrition plan” are really there because they’ve started to suspect that their coffee is hurting t...
A reader emailed me last month asking why every mushroom-coffee bag in her cupboard called itself “adaptogenic” while the bottle of ashwagandha in her medici...
I see the same question in clinic three or four times a month. A patient sits down, pulls out a bag of chicory coffee, and asks why something so frequently r...
Four Sigmatic has been around long enough that it’s no longer the underdog. When we started covering mushroom coffee, Four Sigmatic was the brand readers had...
I get asked about chicory lattes more than any other drink on this site. Some people want a creamy caffeine-free morning ritual, some are tapering off coffee...
The first time I tried carob coffee, I had no idea what I was tasting. The mug looked like coffee. The smell was warm and faintly cocoa-like but not quite ch...
The question lands in my inbox at least once a week, usually from a reader who has just been diagnosed with prediabetes or who is tracking glucose with a con...
A friend texted me last spring with a screenshot from an Instagram wellness account claiming that “decaf coffee is one of the worst things you can drink.” Sh...
I drank coffee every morning for nineteen years. Then for about eighteen months I didn’t. Then I started again. Then I cut back. Along the way I tried, in ro...
I’ll say the loud part first: chicory root is the best coffee alternative you can buy for under ten dollars. I’ve tried all of them — mushroom powders, carob...
People lump them together — “coffee without the caffeine” — and then get confused when they don’t taste the same, or when the decaf still gives them heartbur...
We get this question a lot: is mushroom coffee actually better than regular coffee, or is it a trend with good marketing? The answer, like a lot of things, i...
If you’ve landed here, you’ve probably already figured out that “caffeine-free” is a bigger tent than it sounds. It includes the herbal blends that try to ta...
Somewhere in year two of drinking herbal coffee daily, it stops being a substitute and starts being the thing itself. You stop comparing it to coffee. You st...
Chicory coffee is one of those drinks that feels new to a lot of Americans and is, in fact, two centuries old. It was the workaround during the Continental B...
Somewhere between the third LinkedIn post about “brain fog” and the fourth Instagram ad for adaptogens, most of us have heard the pitch for mushroom coffee. ...
A couple of years ago, the big claim in the coffee-adjacent internet was that a morning cup could make you productive. Now the pitch has flipped. Every third...
When a pregnant client asks me whether they can drink mushroom coffee, there are really two questions tangled together: one about caffeine, and one about the...
This question comes up in my clinical practice more than almost any other coffee-alternative question. Pregnant clients have usually already cut caffeine (or...
On day 2 of my first real attempt at quitting coffee, I poured myself a glass of water with lemon and stared at it like it had personally insulted me. The pr...
When I was reporting on addiction medicine a decade ago, I was surprised to learn that caffeine withdrawal was a formal diagnostic entity. I had thought of c...
One of the most common questions I get from clients cutting caffeine is the most practical one: how long is this going to last?
I have quit caffeine four times. The first time was cold turkey, a Monday morning, and by Tuesday evening I had a headache so bad I thought I was getting the...