What's actually in your cup — chicory, carob, mushrooms, and the rest.
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
“2,000 mg proprietary mushroom blend.” “Full-spectrum mushroom extract.” “Real mushrooms, not mycelium.” Three products can carry some version of that langua...
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 ...
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...
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...
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.
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...
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...
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...
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 ...
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...
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 “...
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...
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...
Long before mushroom lattes and adaptogen blends, before chicory had a moment and matcha had an Instagram account, America already had its coffee alternative...
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 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 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...
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 ...
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 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...
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...