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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...