Drink Your Coffee Black

This last one is just for fun—making and drinking coffee is about enjoyment. So if you like cream and sugar, don't let me scare you off of it. 😉 I don't make fun of anyone for the way they prefer their coffee. That just feels mean-spirited and self-important to me. But I drink my coffee black, and here's some reasons why.

Why should I drink my coffee black?

For one thing, flavored creamer and processed sugar are not good for you! Sugar in particular is just unhealthy. And most flavored creamers that you can get in the grocery store have still more sugar in them. Every chance you can take to cut processed sugars out of your diet is a chance you ought to consider. Without them, coffee is actually a very narrowly calorie negative beverage—which means, you burn ever-so-slightly more calories from processing the caffeine than the coffee itself adds to your system.

But on a more serious note, if you've been following along with this guide up to this point, then you've already put a ton of effort into improving your coffee game. Covering up that coffee with creamer and sugar sortof undoes all that work by preventing you from tasting the difference anyway.

But isn't coffee super bitter?

All coffee is slightly bitter, yes! But most of the bitterness that most people associate with coffee comes from tasting cheap or badly prepared coffee. Coffee that is fresh, well-roasted, well-ground, and well-brewed has tons of flavor that is not bitter at all—some people even find it slightly "sweet" (not in a sugary sort of way, but with a subtle fruit-like sweetness).

I like to drink my coffee black partly because my favorite creamer flavor of all time went out of production and no creamer I've ever tasted since has been as good. But partly, I drink it black so that I get feedback on how well or how poorly I did my brewing this time around. And sometimes, when my beans are especially old or I've done a particularly iffy job on the brew, I'll add some sugar rather than waste it (or suffer through a cup that just tastes horrible!).