The coffee ritual

What would we drink in the morning if we were limited to the 100 mile food experiment.
 I drink coffee, I like cofee, maybe it's like nicotine and I have an addiction. Across the street is a coffee hut and it has a constant stream of cars every morning.
 What would you be drinking if through some catastrophic event occurred and no imported coffee or teas were available.
Looks like Youpon is the only caffinated North American tea and it doesn't grow near me.
Is it just a ritual? Like packing a pipe with tabacco or fly fishing is it the process?

I do love coffee. Mostly the flavor. I actually don't like the caffeine, but decaf doesn't taste as good. I think there really is something about a hot drink in the morning, especially in the colder months. If coffee weren't available, I'd probably just drink herbal tea or water.

I haven't tried it, but cleavers (Galium aparine) is supposed to be a good coffee substitute and has caffeine. The plant is actually in the same family as coffee. Cleavers are extremely abundant where I live and I would bet other places too. https://www.wildwalks-southwest.co.uk/how-to-make-wild-cleaver-coffee/

Ah, Galium aparine perhaps all is not lost it does grow here and would grow in my zone, but this is the first I have ever heard of it.

Hey Robert;
Being a confirmed coffeeholic that is one Scary  scenario !
OMG NO COFFEE???

Ok so humans are resilient adaptive creatures.
We (I) might be miserable, but a substitute  hot beverage drink  would be figured out.
Would it be caffeinated?  I doubt it.
Would we become naturally hyper vigilant without stimulants?  I suspect so...

Let us hope that this horror scenario never becomes a part of our reality...

Trade - including very long distance trade - has been part of human history since we first became humans. Some theorise that the ability to trade with unrelated humans is what made us human to start with. And the items that formed the backbone of the early trades were small high value items; commonly tools, ornamentation (jewellery, fine cloth etc..), flavour (eg the spice trade), or drugs.

Lower value items, like bulk foods, were traded over much smaller distances.

Where modern trade has deviated from this is trading bulk goods over distances that were previously reserved for high value items.

I see little trouble with transporting coffee a longer distance, but I get concerned when eg wheat is transported globally.

Answering the original question; if i had to drink locally I would probably need to drink water, beer, or wine. Although a few boutique gin distilleries have popped up locally too.

I presently see this as an absolute nightmare scenario as well... However, I will be relocating this year, and when I acknowledged that I would be gardening more and in a more rural area, this thought has definitely crossed my mind.

I've not done much research into this yet. However, I recall that chicory was used as a substitute during the world wars. I have also tried yerba mate and guarana when living in less-urban areas, and when I didn't have the luxury of a coffee joint in bicycling distance.

I wonder what might be grown in North America, specifically in a northern continental climate. Maybe I'll be out of luck, but I'll definitely try. Don't want to give up my hot drink just yet. :)

Michael, I think the Russian and Polish famines of the early 20's are an probably a good thing that comes from the ability to transport wheat. If aid agencies asked as Hoover did to be in charge of the distribution of the aid offered initially to insure those in need recieved the foods/aid provided that would prohibit some of the percieved issues we often hear of. I need another cup of coffee now.

Since my (part time, not truly necessary) job IS coffee, I'm guessing, I'd be out of a job, and have a wicked caffeine withdrawal headache, for a couple days. But, maybe I'll be able to skip the headache, if it doesn't happen in this century any time soon. One of my long term pipedreams plans is a greenhouse big and tall enough to support a few dwarf citrus trees, a few banana plants, a dozen or so coffee bushes, and maybe a few other subtropical/tropical/ Mediterranean items.

I've started drinking a lot of coffee lately and have started mixing my coffee grounds 50/50 with ground chaga fungus. This creates a very agreeable flavour. So if I could not access coffee I would go 100% chaga, just no caffeine content though.

I’d probably go to tea made from all the bee balm and other mints I have growing around the house.

In the unthinkable scenario that I have to give up coffee... I would start improving my tea leaf fermentation to get my tea to turn into something close to black tea.

I have several... maybe 5? tea plants in the forest garden. I tried making black tea once, but it didn't turn out very well. Probably a cultivar thing mostly. Japanese tea isn't really suited to it.

I suppose I could get used to drinking green tea as a morning beverage... but that would be the later compromise.

Speaking of that. It's time for my coffee ritual.

As a non-coffee drinker, you would think it would be difficult to empathize, alas, I really do appreciate a quality green tea in the morning. I agree with the sentiment that there's something about a hot drink in the morning when the house is cold.

The savings grace may be that there are some cold-tolerant tea plants out there, and pound for pound, I suspect you get more tea from dried tea leaves than coffee from coffee beans, so I may have to convert the lot of you - for safety reasons of course!

I thought this was going to be like the alternative to the tea ceremony.....

I just have one cup of coffee a week. On a Sunday morning I try not to wake anyone up, and make myself a latte with real milk (assuming we have some spare). I remember my Dad doing this for us as children very seldom as a real treat. The rest of the time I drink loose leaf black tea with a little milk. Lots of it.

It is a ritual for some people, that required cup of java. Do you scrape the foam off your Guinness? Do you stir your grean tea with a bamboo whisk?  French press, cold brewed, flavored? All surrounded by our own weird rituals like lucky socks.

Cleavers would certainly be easy to harvest, just walk through them!

Yarrow makes a good tea. It's the only tea that tastes good to me without any sugar. It may not be good for extended use or by people who have thick blood, though.

i’m growing tea, but it will be a little while before i could provide myself with a cup every morning.

this time of year i like to have a pot on the woodstove, making long, slow steeped twig teas so it’s easy to come in from working in the cold and have a quick cup of something warm. just finished a pot of sweet birch (Betula lenta) twig tea. the next may be a mix of sassafras and spicebush. hemlock’s a good one, too (eastern hemlock, Tsuga canadensis, not the poisonous herbaceous plants!). no caffeine in these, but somewhat ritualized!

Chicory or mint tea

I forgot - I just discovered that douglas fir needles make a really good tea and have a sizeable amount of vitamin C in them.

Hi, I once switched from coffee to tea and thought my head would burst. Then I found dandelion, mint, orange flavored, raspberry, blueberry, white pine needle, and tried whatever I could use to experiment with. Some success and some failures. I love a hot drink and sip it all day long.

We do have coffee growing here (nextdoor, in fact), but as others have pointed out you need to have a lot of bushes even for just your own consumption. Also they all come ripe at the same time and need to be harvested and dried together, so you need a big patio (usually tennis court size, or bigger). AND the weather (frost) and resulting diseases have been killing our coffee plants lately, so most people just have a coffee bush because they're pretty.

All that said, I lost my coffee ritual when I moved from NY to Japan in those dark days prior to a Starbucks or even Mr Donut on every corner, and no good coffee in the market. I worked in an office that had an enormous thermos of green tea going all day long, and I never looked back!

That said, I would love to see yerba maté (Ilex paraguaiensis) become more widely known. It grows in temperate regions, is great for the environment (the tree is large, you harvest a portion of the leaves every few years, but the trees stay forever, and they grow well with other crops), the trees need pretty much no care, and there are some breeding programs for improved flavor, higher or lower caffeine levels, heat resistance, etc. The leaves need to just be dried and can be drunk as tea or with a straw (chimarrão/yerba maté/tererê). They can also be fermented and end up like black tea-- not the same, but similar and delightful in their own way.

When I lived in Alaska, the natives drank "tundra tea" which I later found out is also known as "Labrador tea"
I liked it, collected the plant, and drank quite a bit, but I don't think it grows near where I live here in Michigan.
I also think there is some question about the safety of some of the compounds in it...
But, I'd love a good cup of tundra tea to reminisce about my time in Alaska.  

Robert Ray wrote: What would you be drinking if through some catastrophic event occurred and no imported coffee or teas were available.

Walk south until I hit coffee growing country . . . And don’t get in my way! :P

So many good alternatives!

I think roasted chicory root or roasted dandelion root come the closest in flavor, but they are admittedly a far cry from coffee.. The chaga suggestion or addition sounds like it would make it better.

There are a bunch of commercially available mushroom beverages these days as coffee substitutes (Mudwater is one) but I haven't tried them. They could become a big(ger) thing with supply disruptions. Does anyone like those?

Isn't there a bush for more northern climates that produces a coffee like bean substitute? Oh, found it: the Kentucky coffee tree (from here https://www.offthegridnews.com/off-grid-foods/8-coffee-substitutes-you-can-grow-in-any-climate/).

I know a lot of folks love yerba mate, but that is not my favorite.

There was a tea alternative to grow for a certain climate (Southern U S.) that I read about that was highly caffeinated as well, but far easier to grow in some places, but the name escapes me.

EDIT:  found the Southern caffeinated tea alternative - yaupon! More about it here:  
https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/08/04/429071993/heres-the-buzz-on-americas-forgotten-native-tea-plant.

Oh hey, check out this blend. I'm not a fan of Ashwaganda because it makes me cranky (when it's supposed to do the opposite!), but I might be able to tolerate yerba mate in a blend like this.

One could mix and match their own blends similar to this at home.

Green Beans can be kept and roasted whenever the wish arises
My experience is thst fresh roasted is much more rich and satisfying than dead coffee (dead = over 7-10 days old)
Also most generally available coffee is Robusta - less flavour - more caffeine problems than Arabica.
100% Arabica cofee may not be as disturbing as the regular cooffee and coffee that is 100% Arabica is usually marked as the Arabica bushes require more attention, crop lower and therefore are more expensive.
We pay $14 for a 2lb bag of greent beans (16 oz green beans is said to make 12 oz of roasted cofee - that's why coffee is often sold in 12oz packets)

Asher Yaron on how fresh roasted coffee works https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JaQNy0Ef4YY

More  info on roasting coffee on a frying pan bit.ly/realcoffeeprocess

There's a big marketing push for mushroom coffee and it seems overly expensive given the ingeredients.
I don't see why adding mushroom powder (eg from Paul Stammets site fungi.com) to ground coffee or to the cup of coffee is any different from making our own from the two ingredients - apart from the fact that some of the "mushroom coffee" has little to no mushroom extract in it.

Green beans should keep for a while.
(Asher Yaron talks about the best coffee he's tasted from Java which is aged 7 years before being relesed.)

Coffee (one of the major cash crops in some areas of the world) may be on it's way out.
Coffee is tending towards being grown at higher and higher altitudes globally as temperatures rise so the cost of buying lsnd and diminishing acreage for growing means that coffee will probably increase in price, disappear or be replaced by engineered hybrids eventually.

Coffee is not local so some of us find that a difficulty
Complete abstinence from all non local things could be fun but, where I live most metal is created elsewhere with ore from other countries etc. etc.
Maybe energy put into innovative mainstreaming of wiser ideas for improving nature's balance etc. has a more massive and long term effectiveness than being caught in a 100%er trap in any areas of change right now.

Dandelion, yarrow, many mints varieties, raspberry, chicory are all accessible to me. As readily as pine needle for tea are available to me, I'm afraid I like gin better and with all the junipers nearby I can make that. My 100-mile food experiment might rely on the cleaver seed for my caffeine, I've ordered the seed and I'll try that.  Limiting all my needs (steel) to a 100-mile radius would definitely be a challenge. I'm not sure what a 100%er means Roderick but with supply challenges that are currently present being a Locavore food wise might become more of a reality for awhile.  The coffee ritual the after-work beer ritual winding up or winding down food and drink play a big part in starting the day as well as ending the day.

No worry for me LOL
I am allergic to coffee. Can't stand the smell (stench?) of it.
I'm a tea drinker. ANY tea will do, as long as I can sip a cup in silence ( in the morning, after I wake up). Home made from my dehydrated herbs/wild shrubs/ forest/bushes  etc. or store bought  and only the Twinning's Earl Gray:-)

I've been 100% spoiled on an organic coffee called KickAss, roasted by KickingHorse, a coffee roasting company in Canada.   Been grinding it and setting it to 'brew' with our fresh, cold, well water over night, then drain the Toddy brewer into a carafe .  Voila.  It provides one week of fresh-every-morning shots of cold-brew coffee.  No acid, no dizzying side effects of caffeine, just lovely fresh coffee.   What would I do without Coffee?  I like a few store-bought herb teas, and have no problems turning to whatever I can find in the wild, be that Fir needles, the chaga I see growing on trees around here, or tapping into the endless supply of lovely dandelion roots to roast them and enjoy.  Also have a few wild herbs to add some nice flavor.  Point is, I enjoy a hot brew of something in the mornings.  

That's what I was wondering 10 years ago and this is how I solved it: https://www.youtube.com/@diy.coffee

I LOVE coffee. The one thing I dislike about it is that's it can't be grown locally. If coffee was not available, I would drink tea and yaupon holly, both hot and iced. I already enjoy herbal teas later in the day. It would be an adjustment, I still drink way too much coffee. Admittedly, our tea camelias are still tiny and it may be a while till there's a big enough harvest.

My thinking is that aside from a few days of caffeine withdrawal, if this situation came to pass, there would be far more difficult adjustments to make.

It s been a long day picking raspberries with all those pesky cleaver plants.
Did you say a drink ma de with those very tiny seeds
I m up for it

Coffee is a not to interrupt ritual, an entire French press, large family size all for me.
I don t go for alternatives that could just remind me of whatever.
Coffee, should a situation arise, could become a holiday or xmas treat to be enjoyed on special occasions.
Total agreement with the hot drink requirement at certain times.
Currently, as it s warmer with lots of physical activity, there is a jug of water with sprigs of melissa and liquorice mint.

There is a stash of raw coffee beans somewhere which might be sown at some point.
My loving attitude is either you grow or you don t.

A useful tip
when people are panic buying toilet paper, I calmly stroll down to a coffee supplier to acquire a modest addition to my coffee hawl.

To our extremely good health
Blessings
MH  

I don’t think coffee would be totally unavailable.  I do feel we would be priced out of it possibly.  

As for a substitute I would harvest dandelion root.   Also make a variety teas while local foraging.  Everything we need is right here.

For a caffeine source I’ll have to do some research.

This is a very timely subject to revisit, given that global weather shifts are stressing traditional coffee farms, and recent supply chain issues are likely to increase the price and reduce availability of coffee for a lot of people. We've seen this coming for a while, and have been looking into a number of alternatives.

As noted above, cleavers (Galium aparine) is the popular go-to alternative, at least for discussion, and we actually enjoy steeping the plant as an early spring green tea.  But it will be a challenge for our small garden to grow enough of them to make roasting the tiny seeds a viable option. Fortunately we have LOTS of herbal options for hot morning beverages. Our wild blackberries give us leaves all year long, and we have hibiscus, mulberry, curly dock and pine for flavorful alternatives. Spring greens (chickweed, speedwell, purple dead nettle, etc.) are also nice options.

We've solved the caffeine by planting yaupon holly, widely advertised as the 'only native North American caffeinated plant'. (Apparently the caffeine content of cleavers is negligible by comparison.)

Roasted coffee substitutes besides cleavers include dark-roasted peanuts, pecans, and dandelion or native desert chicory roots. If things get bad enough, we may even give roasted acorns, hackberry seeds, or mushrooms a try.

I've been thinking lately about pine needle tea, especially since so many local trees are dying from drought and beetle infestation. I have read contradictory information about already brown needles, so I plan to test fresh vs brown to see what the difference might be, taste-wise.

Pine needle tea is supposed to be rich in Vit C (more than citrus!) and Vit A, as well as other nutrients. Another bonus is that harvesting pine needles doesn't disturb the roots or the flowering/seeding parts. Not only that, but as long as there are pinon pines on/near my property, I'll have an year-round tea source for free.

While I generally am less than thrilled about teas, I do think about the price of coffee and the potential for unavailability the way things are going these days. Seems to me I could learn to drink tea.

Oh sorry just stimulants? Black tea. It's my standby up north because coffee is so expensive! I come back completely cured of cravings. I think I have enough for a couple of years. Cheap stuff in bags. I can't grow it in zone 4b

Robert Ray wrote:What would we drink in the morning if we were limited to the 100 mile food experiment.
 I drink coffee, I like cofee, maybe it's like nicotine and I have an addiction. Across the street is a coffee hut and it has a constant stream of cars every morning.
 What would you be drinking if through some catastrophic event occurred and no imported coffee or teas were available.
Looks like Youpon is the only caffinated North American tea and it doesn't grow near me.
Is it just a ritual? Like packing a pipe with tabacco or fly fishing is it the process?

Well if we’re only talking about caffeine/stimulants, there’s Yerba Maté (Ilex paraguensis) which can be grown in some parts of USA and shipped or ‘trained’ all over USA; there’s also Tea (Camelia sinensis) which can be grown in many places in USA.
The Kola nut I believe has caffeine?
As does Guarana.
Also cocoa bean

Most of these can be grown in the zone 10 or higher areas of USA and there’s no reason why we couldn’t. It’s just been easier and cheaper to have it sent to onus already grown and processed from other countries.

Rubia, the coffee genus, includes cold temperate plants like Bedstraw and Madder, but apparently they have carcinogenic compounds. Maybe there’s a way to remove them and use these plants as caffeine for cooler regions?

I also suspect there’ll be large climate and humidity controlled greenhouses for growing coffee. It’s too expensive and too definitely a successful crop not to.
It just won’t taste as good as real coffee grown in the ground in forests and with real sun.

I need a coffee in the morning to wake me up.  Not sure the Cleavers will work for us as it gives mission control a fiery rash.  Cleavers, if you've a dog like ours grows all over the place (she distributes the seeds via her coat).

Rosebay Willowherb can be made into a palatable tea - it used to be the staple tea before Ceylon tea was taken and marketed by the Brits. I've attached an article I put together for permaculture magazine about Ivan's Tea.