Any fellow black coffee drinkers here? What made you come over to the dark side (pun intended)?
My mom always took her coffee black, so did my grandma, so I think it imparted onto me. For me I like the bitterness, when I take a sip of my morning coffee and it hits there's nothing like it.
Over the years I've tried to get into sugared coffees and I still keep coming back to black. Although every now and then iced coffee with creamer and sugar is a good treat.
Creamer was another expense when I was in college, and I kinda wanted to see if I could “make” myself like it. And now I have my scale, burr grinder, pour over, local beans…
Actually good coffee. Drank the cheapest and nastiest coffee, had to use sugar and salt to make it palatable. When i first visited Cuba, i got a coffee not long after i got off the plane. The difference is night and day. Also, instead of energy drinks, i just had a shot of nasty espressor and a cold bottle of water to wake me up on the night shifts.
I ran out of creamer and sugar one time at the same time and tried my coffee plain. I think it was Guatemalan beans and I remember making it slightly stronger than usual then tasting it and saying "damn this is actually pretty fruity tasting" and enjoying it.
I personally enjoy more earthy and richer flavors like Sumatran though so I mainly stick with that as I'm able to.
Also making your coffee with anything other than a proletarian drip coffee maker is bourgeois decadence
With the right grind and the right water temperature for the right roast, your coffee will have a complex profile. Some varieties can taste sweet, fruity even without adding anything.
I'll take it black when I absolutely need an immediate shock to the system. Black coffee helped me write some of my best English 100 essays; especially after one of them saw LibreOffice throw an unexpected crash and lose me eight pages worth of draft work. (That one's 98% on me, though. I was slipping on my ctrl-s frequency that day and I paid for it.)
I just got tired of super sweet coffees that tasted more like candy than coffee. These days at most I'll put drink it with oatmilk.
Also youtube kept recommending James Hoffman videos so I eventually got surious about how to brew coffee and how differently they taste and I'll try different beans to get new experiences.
I worked at a few different second and third wave coffee shops. The fancy hipster third wave ones had incredible coffee and espresso from all over the world. Tbh if being a barista paid a decent wage I might still be doing it.
Now that I'm a lot older though coffee makes my lil tumtum hurt though so I don't drink it often
Getting a cold brew setup going at home. It's smoother, less acidic, and allows me to appreciate the different properties of each roast. Since it makes a concentrate, I can vary the strength as needed.
If I'm having iced coffee, the cold foam stuff on top can be a nice change of pace.
I just finished a good cup and my mouth is unbearably tangy with acidity. I think your comment finally convinced me to buy a setup. I've loved every cold brew I've tasted.
When I was much younger I did some summers of manual labor and the crew I worked with had a habit of taking in a mouthful of warm water, a spoonful of instant coffee, then shaking your head vigorously before swallowing. I think that focus on coffee as a caffeine delivery drug stuck with me. I enjoy a good cup of coffee but I will drink just about anything as coffee. If I want something that tastes good I prefer tea.
I appreciate the different flavors black coffee offers. From the different roasts to the various growing locations, each bring their own unique tastes. For hot coffee I prefer a darker roast, and the opposite for iced coffee.
At the same time, I'm a huge sucker for the glorified Hot Chocolate known as a Mocha. What's weird is I never go halfway; I don't like cream or sugar in black coffee.
For a time as a high schooler, I wanted to seem more interesting than other people so I drank it black. Honestly I kinda hated it, and went back to drinking it with cream and sugar, but that was more because I was drinking Tim Hortons.
Once my dad started showing me how to make actual good coffee with good beans, I never went back. Even iced coffee I prefer black most of the time.
I used to drink black coffee (the only correct way to drink coffee, fyi). Then I lived in madagascar where they made half their coffee sugar. I couldn't go back. Now I even add milk, like a failure.
No insult intended to people with the disease, but I saw a friend of mine shoot his thigh with insulin enough times. Like everyone in my family over 40 has diabetes, and I'm just like "nope" to dealing with that.
I used to be a barista. Some rushes were so bad there was no time to drink coffee or eat, so if I accidentally pulled a regular shot instead of decaf, I'd just casually down that mid-rush. Also never liked particularly sweet coffee and I'm lactose-intolerant, so I was destined for this.
I was like 13 and I wanted to be more adult. Couldn't finish the first cup, after a week I was able to choke it down, by 2 weeks I thought it was okay, by a month I wouldn't have it any other way.
To answer your question, for real: coffee is something I generally drink for caffeine content. Although every now and then, I might put some soy creamer and maple syrup, my main concern isn't taste. Even then, if the coffee is quality, black coffee's taste can still be very pleasing either way.
My parents growing up drank strong, very dark roasts with a bit of heavy cream. I got into coffee with heavy cream, or even whipped cream if I was feeling fancy, using their beans and such. But later on after moving out I discovered lighter roasts with milder, more floral or fruity flavors, and around that time I started taking my coffee black consistently and went kinda deep on making pour overs and later espresso.
Now I save milk (usually oat) for like, lattes or for tempering the flavor of particularly nasty tasting coffee when I'm out and about. Once and a while I'll get the right combination of really delicious oat milk and a skilled barista that gets it foamed up fully without scorching it, and it'll be heavenly, but usually sticking to black is a safer bet even at fancy coffee shops if you don't want cow milk (not to complain, I'm not particularly good at making lattes either even at home with all the time in the world)
I did come back around to medium and slightly dark roasts, but the shit my parents drank is still a bit over-done for my tastes, even from good quality roasters. Probably not helped by the fact they used blade grinders exclusively
The one downside of black light roast coffee is the acidity often does unpleasant things to my stomach if I don't eat
I drink it both long black and as a flat white. Black is what I make when it's too cold to steam milk, or when I don't want to have to bear the indignity of paying extra for non-dairy milk.
Good black coffee is great, but bad black coffee is shit water. So if I'm unsure on quality from a place I'll get a flat white or latte.
I started drinking it at work in high school, the place I worked had a deal with a coffee shop so we got free coffee. I always drank it with cream until I went to university and the first day I woke up and realized I didn't buy any, so I decided to just drink it black and never bought more cream.
I started my first cup or coffee black because I didn't want the extra caloric content from sugar + cream/milk and just never stopped drinking it black ever since. I guess it also helped that I got the coffee from a mom and pop coffee shop and not like starbucks.
One day, many years ago, I thought to myself "Hmm, if I'm going to become an adult soon, I aught to acclimate myself to the taste of black coffee" and I did. Many years later and cream and sugar taste off to me. Flavored coffee (as long as its whole bean, grinding my own has been a gamechanger!) and unsweetened flavors are a special treat every once in a while.
I think sugar tastes bad in coffee and when i first started drinking it at my warehouse job all they had was the powdered "coffee whitener" which tasted so bad. I was trying to wean off energy drinks because I was so fat and drinking at least 2 monsters a day. No caffiene isn't an option
It's just yummy, and the flavor is way more intense. I brew and drink some pretty fancy coffees sometimes, but even still I don't really care about the differences between anything above mid-tier, so that's where I usually live. It's just nice to have something to sip on that hurts ya back, ya know?
Though admittedly, I'll sometimes go for a brown sugar shaken espresso monstrosity, but those are on pretty rare occasions, and usually when I'm already making one for my spouse anyways.
I started roasting green coffee myself cause it's cheaper, so I always want to taste it unadulterated to get better and know the important factors in detail. But I also enjoy coffee every other way.
I have experimented with sugar, cream (dairy, soy, almond, coconut, oatmilk), and both combined, but I return to black and have stayed this way for years now. Sugar hurts my teeth, and I am not realy interested in adding calorie dense stuff to my happy juice. And I love the taste of black coffee. It can be shit sometimes, but at it's best it surpasses anything sweeteners or cream can add.
mr coffee drip never does me wrong. when im feeling fancy ill get out the percolator. coffee with cream and sugar gives my mouth a waxy feeling, so ill always drink black