What's actually in your cup — chicory, carob, mushrooms, and the rest.
Reishi turns up on a lot of mushroom coffee labels, usually next to chaga, lion’s mane and cordyceps. The usual write-ups either praise it or skip it. There ...
If you’ve looked at mushroom coffee, you’ve seen chaga on the label. It sounds like a trendy wellness ingredient, and the usual write-ups either rave about i...
Most of the ingredients on this site are caffeine-free stand-ins for coffee. Yaupon is a different kind of entry: a native American plant that people have br...
Most coffee alternatives try to taste like coffee. Cascara doesn’t try. It is the fruit that grows around the coffee bean, dried and steeped like tea, and it...
If you like the smell of something roasting more than the taste of coffee itself, hojicha deserves a look. It is a Japanese tea, and it is the nearest thing ...
Rye is the quiet member of the grain-coffee family. Barley gets the headlines, and chicory gets the flavor credit, but read enough ingredient lists on herbal...
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...