Surrogates: Anything but the coffee

What happens when coffee disappears? This is not a thought experiment! It’s happened many times in history: War, blockades, tariffs, ideology, health panics, sanctions, supply shocks. When coffee is not around, people still need something warm, comforting, and familiar. And throughout history, people have reached for coffee surrogates: roasted plants and grains engineered to look like coffee…but do they actually taste like coffee? In this episode, Jonathan and James time-travel by taste testing a truly alarming number of coffee substitutes. Spoiler: you will hear a lot of spitting! Which leads to the bigger question: can anything actually replace coffee—or will we always come crawling back? Please spread the word about A History of Coffee!

You can listen to Surrogates: Anything but the coffee online on Radio and Podcast. Open the player on this page to stream the available audio.

Surrogates: Anything but the coffee is an episode from Filter Stories - Coffee Documentaries by James Harper.

This episode is 46:25 long.

This episode was published on Mar 2, 2026.

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