What We Tell People Who Say "I Don't Like Coffee"
The single most common question we get, in person at the roastery and over email, is some version of: "I don't really like coffee. What would you recommend?"
For the first year, our answer was a polite recommendation for our milder options — usually our Jasmine tea or our hibiscus berry tea — and a sentence about how coffee is an acquired taste. That answer was technically correct and completely missed what people were actually asking.
What they were actually asking, it turned out, was: "Help me figure out what I do like, because I keep being handed coffee I don't enjoy and I don't know why." The polite recommendation was helpful in the moment. The underlying question — why do I keep being given coffee I don't like — was the one that mattered.
This is the post about what we tell people now, after four years of having this conversation. It's not a marketing pitch for our catalog. It's the actual answer we give when people ask, written down so we can point to it instead of re-typing the same paragraph every week.
If you've ever said "I don't really like coffee" and felt like the conversation ended there, this is for you.
The honest version of what "I don't like coffee" usually means
Most people who say "I don't like coffee" don't mean they don't like coffee. They mean they don't like the coffee they've been served. The reasons vary, but they cluster into four groups, and knowing which group is which changes the answer entirely.
Group 1: They don't like bitter coffee. This is the most common group, and the easiest to help. The coffee they've been served has been over-extracted (left too long in the brewer, brewed with water that's too hot, made from beans that have been sitting too long). The cup tastes harsh, sharp, or ashy, and they've associated that flavor with "coffee" as a category.
The fix for this group: try a different brewing method, not a different bean. Specifically, switch from drip or French press to pourover, which gives you more control over extraction. Use the ratio and timing discipline from our pour over brewing guide. The same beans brewed correctly will taste completely different from the same beans brewed carelessly.
If pourover is too much ceremony for the morning, the second-best fix is a milk-heavy preparation — a latte or a cappuccino — which buffers the bitterness without removing the coffee flavor. We make a mocha flavored coffee that does this in a different way: it's pre-flavored to taste like a mocha, so the bitterness is masked at the bean level instead of the milk level.
Group 2: They don't like the acidity of light-roast coffee. Specialty coffee in the last 10 years has trended toward lighter roasts that showcase origin character — the citrus of an Ethiopian, the fruit-forward quality of a Kenyan, the clean washed character of a Costa Rican. If someone's been drinking lighter-roast specialty coffee expecting it to taste "like coffee," they may have been getting something closer to a bright fruit tea than the dark, rounded cup they were imagining.
The fix for this group: try a medium-dark or full-medium roast with chocolate-and-nut flavor profile rather than citrus-and-fruit. Our Brazil Santos and Colombia are the right starting points for this group — they're both medium roasts with milk chocolate and brown sugar in the cup, no sharp acidity. Drink them black first to see what the roast is actually doing, then add milk if the cup is still too "bright."
If even a medium roast is too bright, our Whiskey Barrel Aged is the deeper, more rounded end of the spectrum — aged in bourbon barrels, with butterscotch and dark chocolate notes. It's not for everyone, but it's the "this is what a full-bodied cup of coffee actually tastes like" anchor of our lineup.
Group 3: They don't like the taste of coffee with breakfast food. This is a less common group but a real one. They don't mind coffee in isolation, but coffee plus eggs, coffee plus bacon, coffee plus pastry — the combination registers as wrong to them, often because of the acidity of the coffee against the fat and salt of the breakfast.
The fix for this group: try a different pairing, not a different coffee. Specifically, drink coffee before the breakfast food rather than alongside it, or pair coffee with something neutral like plain toast or a banana. If you're a "coffee with breakfast" person who has never tried drinking coffee 15 minutes before eating, you'll find the cup suddenly makes more sense.
The other option is to switch to tea at breakfast. Tea (especially green or black tea) handles savory breakfasts better than coffee does. Our hibiscus berry tea or jasmine green tea are the obvious starting points if you want something that won't fight the eggs. The people I've talked to in this group are often surprised by how much they like coffee once they discover the right pairing context.
Group 4: They actually don't like coffee, and that's fine. Some people just don't like coffee. The flavor profile doesn't appeal to them, the caffeine feels wrong in their body, the social ritual of drinking it isn't something they enjoy, or any combination. This is a real and legitimate preference.
For this group, the answer is: don't drink it. Drink tea, drink cocoa, drink whatever you want. We make a small catalog of teas and matcha specifically because not everyone in the room wants coffee, and we don't think they should have to drink it to be part of a coffee company.
Our matcha is the closest cousin to coffee in our catalog — it has caffeine, it has a focus-enhancing effect from L-theanine, it has a complex flavor profile that rewards attention — but it doesn't taste like coffee, and it's not trying to. If you've been told you should like coffee because it's the "morning drink," matcha is the alternative that does the same job without the coffee flavor.
The specific case we encounter most often in this group: people who liked coffee in college, then stopped drinking it, then felt like they should start again because everyone around them drinks it. If that's you, the right answer is to drink what you actually want, not what the social context implies you should want. We're a coffee company and we don't think you should drink coffee if you don't want to.
The flip side: what changed when we started listening
The thing that surprised us about having these conversations is that people started telling us what they actually wanted. Not what they thought they should want — what they actually wanted. And the answer was almost always more specific than "I want a milder coffee."
Some examples from real conversations:
- A customer who told us she liked coffee in Italy but not at home, and figured out the difference was the roast: Italian coffee is dark, American specialty is light. Now she buys our Colombia (medium roast) for home and enjoys it every morning.
- A customer who said he didn't like coffee because it upset his stomach, and we figured out together that the issue wasn't the coffee — it was drinking it on an empty stomach first thing in the morning. He's now a pre-breakfast coffee drinker and his stomach is fine. (Not all "coffee hurts my stomach" issues resolve this cleanly, but many do.)
- A customer who told us she drank coffee at work because that's what was available, but she preferred tea at home. We suggested she keep a personal tea stash at her desk and stop drinking the office coffee out of obligation. She's been doing that for two years and emails us about her tea rotation seasonally.
- A customer who said he didn't like coffee but his partner did, and they were always brewing one or the other. We helped them set up a dual brewing station with a pourover for her and a French press for him, and now they each drink what they like without compromise.
These are not unusual stories. They're the kind of thing that happens every week when you actually ask people what they want instead of recommending the most expensive thing on the menu.
What we don't do anymore
For the first year of the business, we made a few mistakes with this question:
- Recommending our most expensive coffee as the default. The most expensive isn't the most accessible, and people who don't like coffee are not the right audience for a $25 single origin anyway.
- Suggesting they "just add more sugar." This is the answer a lot of coffee people give, and it's condescending. If someone doesn't like the flavor of coffee, more sugar isn't going to teach them to like it — it's going to teach them to drink a sugar delivery system that happens to be brown.
- Treating "I don't like coffee" as a problem to solve. It's not a problem. It's information. The customer is telling us what they like and what they don't. Our job is to help them figure out what they actually want, not to talk them into wanting what we sell.
We've stopped doing all three. The version of the conversation we have now is much more like the four groups above — diagnosing which group someone falls into, then pointing them to the right answer, which sometimes is "drink tea" or "drink water" or "drink nothing right now."
For our full catalog — the coffees and teas we offer, with notes on what each one tastes like and who it's for — our how we pick which coffees to stock post is the longer read. For the tea side, our caffeine-free herbal tea guide covers most of what people who don't want caffeine end up choosing.
The point of the post
We wrote this post because the question "I don't like coffee, what do you recommend?" comes up enough that we wanted a single thing to point people to. The answer, as we've laid it out, is mostly diagnostic — figure out which group you're in, then try the fix for that group.
If you're in Group 4 and you just don't like coffee, the post is also for you. The answer is "drink what you want." We don't need you to like coffee. We need you to know what you do like, and then to have access to it. That's it.
If you've been forcing yourself to drink coffee because the people around you drink coffee, try stopping for a week. See what you reach for instead. Most people discover that they already know what they like, and the only thing stopping them is the social implication that they should be drinking coffee.
Brew slow. Sip slow. ☕
P.S. The most useful thing we did as a coffee company was to start making tea and matcha seriously. Not because tea is a bigger business than coffee — it's not, for us at least — but because having a non-coffee option in the catalog gave us a graceful answer to the "I don't like coffee" question that wasn't a dead end. If you're a coffee shop or roastery that doesn't have a real tea option, the single highest-leverage product addition you can make is a small, well-curated tea lineup. It won't replace your coffee business but it will let you serve the people who show up not wanting coffee, which is more of them than you think.