There are a bunch of coffee-tasting substitutes made from roasted grain or other stuff! Coffee beans or anything caffeine-producing don’t enter the equation at all (as opposed to decaf coffee which is derived from coffee beans), the roasted plant taste is just similar. Chicory or dandelion roots are pretty well-known plant for this. Inka is another grain brand that’s good and easy to make, you do it like instant coffee. I’ve seen others at large natural/health/hippie food type stores.
Thanks. The thing that threw me off is that the ingredients label for the coffee-flavored Postum variant includes “natural coffee flavor”. I can’t quickly find reliable information about what “natural coffee flavor” means: a blog post from another beverage maker reports that natural coffee flavor “may be extracted from a variety of plants like chicory, garlic, and yes, sometimes coffee beans” but that the author “can’t guarantee that the flavor company I buy natural coffee flavor from didn’t extract one of the flavor compounds from coffee beans”. I’m surprised that “natural X flavor” is apparently an acceptable ingredients-list entry if it’s not necessarily made from X, and doesn’t say what it is made from?
There are a bunch of coffee-tasting substitutes made from roasted grain or other stuff! Coffee beans or anything caffeine-producing don’t enter the equation at all (as opposed to decaf coffee which is derived from coffee beans), the roasted plant taste is just similar. Chicory or dandelion roots are pretty well-known plant for this. Inka is another grain brand that’s good and easy to make, you do it like instant coffee. I’ve seen others at large natural/health/hippie food type stores.
Thanks. The thing that threw me off is that the ingredients label for the coffee-flavored Postum variant includes “natural coffee flavor”. I can’t quickly find reliable information about what “natural coffee flavor” means: a blog post from another beverage maker reports that natural coffee flavor “may be extracted from a variety of plants like chicory, garlic, and yes, sometimes coffee beans” but that the author “can’t guarantee that the flavor company I buy natural coffee flavor from didn’t extract one of the flavor compounds from coffee beans”. I’m surprised that “natural X flavor” is apparently an acceptable ingredients-list entry if it’s not necessarily made from X, and doesn’t say what it is made from?