I miss coffee. I used to have iced-coffee in the morning a lot, but I’ve been scared of caffeine ever since my insomnia scare of January 2021. (I’ve been to psych prison for sleep deprivation madness twice, and I never want that to happen again.) Yes, I know about decaf, but they don’t get all of the caffeine out, and if you haven’t been using, your tolerance is all gone and you’re super-sensitive to even small doses; I feel safer just abstaining altogether.
I was catching up with Seinfeld on Netflix out of ’90s nostalgia, and in one episode they mentioned a drink called “Postum”, which turns out to be a once-popular caffeine-free coffee substitute that got discontinued and then resurrected by the effort of a couple of tenacious fans. It’s OK! They even have a coffee-flavored variant, which smells realistic but which I haven’t tried yet out of superstition. How do they get the coffee flavor without the drug if the decaf people don’t manage to do it, huh?!
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?
I like this. I think this sort of chatter is both fun and useful because babbling is underrated.
What do you miss about coffee? The caffeine? Taste? I’ve always been confused about the popularity of coffee. I drink it a few times a week simply because I like to get out of my apartment and coffee shops are the place to go. But the taste is nothing special to me, nor is the feeling of being caffeinated. And I get the sense that the same is true of others; I don’t think others particularly love the taste or feeling.
So what explains the popularity? Is it possible that it’s a sort of cached behavior that people just do automatically without really thinking about? Probably not—my money is on some type of addictiveness—but I wonder.
The mechanisms are complementary: the drug attracts people into acquiring a taste for something that’s not naturally tasty—but once acquired, people still have positive associations with the taste. (I’ve been drinking iced Postum every morning, despite objective reports that Postum doesn’t actually taste good.)
I miss coffee. I used to have iced-coffee in the morning a lot, but I’ve been scared of caffeine ever since my insomnia scare of January 2021. (I’ve been to psych prison for sleep deprivation madness twice, and I never want that to happen again.) Yes, I know about decaf, but they don’t get all of the caffeine out, and if you haven’t been using, your tolerance is all gone and you’re super-sensitive to even small doses; I feel safer just abstaining altogether.
I was catching up with Seinfeld on Netflix out of ’90s nostalgia, and in one episode they mentioned a drink called “Postum”, which turns out to be a once-popular caffeine-free coffee substitute that got discontinued and then resurrected by the effort of a couple of tenacious fans. It’s OK! They even have a coffee-flavored variant, which smells realistic but which I haven’t tried yet out of superstition. How do they get the coffee flavor without the drug if the decaf people don’t manage to do it, huh?!
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?
I like this. I think this sort of chatter is both fun and useful because babbling is underrated.
What do you miss about coffee? The caffeine? Taste? I’ve always been confused about the popularity of coffee. I drink it a few times a week simply because I like to get out of my apartment and coffee shops are the place to go. But the taste is nothing special to me, nor is the feeling of being caffeinated. And I get the sense that the same is true of others; I don’t think others particularly love the taste or feeling.
So what explains the popularity? Is it possible that it’s a sort of cached behavior that people just do automatically without really thinking about? Probably not—my money is on some type of addictiveness—but I wonder.
The mechanisms are complementary: the drug attracts people into acquiring a taste for something that’s not naturally tasty—but once acquired, people still have positive associations with the taste. (I’ve been drinking iced Postum every morning, despite objective reports that Postum doesn’t actually taste good.)