Every Time the World Ran Out of Coffee: The Wild History of Coffee Substitutes

Humans have a complicated relationship with coffee. We love it. We build our mornings around it. And every few decades, a war, a blockade, a tariff or a cereal magnate takes it away from us.

What happens next is always the same. People don't stop drinking coffee. They just start roasting whatever is lying around and calling it coffee anyway.

Okra seeds. Acorns. Sweet potato chips. Beets. A woody fungus scraped off a birch tree. The history of the coffee substitute is the history of people absolutely refusing to give up the ritual, and it's a lot weirder than you'd think.

Pour yourself something warm. Here's the tour.

The short version: 240 years of "close enough"

1. 1780s · PrussiaFrederick the Great makes coffee expensive on purpose. Germans start roasting chicory and grains instead.
2. 1806 · FranceNapoleon's Continental Blockade cuts France off from coffee. Chicory goes mainstream.
3. 1861 · American SouthThe Union blockade empties Confederate cups. Enter "Lincoln coffee," brewed from okra seeds, rye and sweet potatoes.
4. 1895 · MichiganC.W. Post launches Postum and declares war on a cartoon villain named Mr. Coffee Nerves.
5. 1914–1945 · EuropeTwo world wars make Ersatzkaffee a household word.
6. 1940s · FinlandWith coffee rationed, Finns brew chaga, a mushroom that grows on birch trees.
7. TodayPeople choose coffee substitutes on purpose. History is very confused.

1780s: The king who hated your coffee habit

Frederick the Great of Prussia had a problem with coffee, and the problem was money. Every bean was imported, which meant Prussian silver was flowing out of the country. So he made coffee a state monopoly, taxed it heavily, and reportedly hired "coffee sniffers" to wander the streets and catch people roasting beans illegally at home.

Germans responded the way people always do: they roasted chicory root, barley and rye and drank that instead. The result got a nickname that's still used today, Muckefuck.

1806: Napoleon accidentally invents New Orleans coffee

In 1806, Napoleon tried to strangle Britain economically with the Continental System, a ban on British trade across Europe. Britain blockaded right back. Guess what stopped arriving in French ports? Coffee.

The French leaned hard into chicory, the roasted root of a blue-flowered plant in the daisy family. It's dark, bitter, toasty, and has zero caffeine. When the blockade collapsed a few years later, a lot of French drinkers kept mixing chicory into their coffee anyway. They'd gotten used to it.

Those habits traveled to French-influenced New Orleans. And that's where the story picks up again, half a century later.

1861: "Lincoln coffee" and the great okra experiment

When the Civil War began, the Union blockaded Southern ports, including New Orleans, which had been one of the country's biggest coffee importers. Within a couple of years, real coffee in the Confederacy went from scarce to basically mythical.

Southerners called their homemade substitutes "Lincoln coffee," after the man they blamed for the empty cups. And the list of things they roasted is spectacular: okra seeds, sweet potato chips, rye, wheat, peanuts, beets, acorns, field peas, cotton seeds, persimmon seeds and even asparagus seeds.

Newspapers of the time ran heated debates about which substitute was best. A Tennessee paper swore that okra coffee could pass for fine imported beans. A Georgia writer insisted sweet potato was the real winner and dared anyone to "detect the difference." Rye, on the other hand, got the brutal review of being "only tolerable."

After the war, most of America went straight back to real coffee. New Orleans didn't. It kept the chicory, and that's why a café au lait with chicory and a plate of beignets is still the city's signature breakfast.

1895: Postum vs. Mr. Coffee Nerves

Then came the marketers.

In 1895, in a barn in Battle Creek, Michigan, C.W. Post created Postum, a roasted blend of wheat, bran and molasses. By many accounts, he got the idea from a "cereal coffee" served at the Battle Creek Sanitarium, run by a certain Dr. John Harvey Kellogg. (Yes, that Kellogg. Battle Creek in the 1890s was basically the Silicon Valley of breakfast.)

Post's real genius was advertising. Postum ads blamed coffee for an astonishing list of problems, from irritability and sleeplessness to failing eyesight. The campaign even had a villain: Mr. Coffee Nerves, a sneaky cartoon character who appeared in newspaper comic strips ruining people's lives until a hero showed up with a cup of Postum and chased him away.

It worked. Postum became the best-selling coffee alternative in America, and its sales jumped again during World War II, when real coffee was rationed. Kraft finally discontinued it in 2007, and its loyal fans did not go quietly. After years of petitions and eBay hoarding, a small company bought the brand and brought it back in 2012.

Mr. Coffee Nerves, sadly, remains retired.

1914–1945: The age of Ersatzkaffee

The two world wars turned coffee substitutes into a fact of life across Europe. In German, the word Ersatz simply means "replacement," and during World War I's blockade Germany produced thousands of ersatz products, coffee very much included. Ersatz coffee was usually roasted grain, malted barley or chicory, and sometimes acorns when things got desperate.

Allied prisoners of war were served it in camps, which is how the word "ersatz" slipped into English. To this day, English speakers use it to mean "a sad imitation." Coffee substitutes have been fighting that reputation ever since.

1940s: The Finns and the mushroom on the birch tree

This is our favorite chapter, for reasons that will become obvious.

Finland is a country that takes coffee extremely seriously; Finns are routinely ranked among the biggest coffee drinkers in the world. So when World War II rationing cut off the supply, Finns didn't just shrug. They went into the forest.

Growing on their birch trees was chaga, a dark, crusty fungus that looks a bit like a lump of burnt charcoal stuck to the bark. Finns had used it in folk remedies for generations. Now they dried it, ground it, and brewed it as a coffee substitute. Chaga brews into a dark, earthy, slightly vanilla-ish drink with no caffeine, which is about as close to "coffee color, coffee ritual" as a forest can get you.

That wartime habit is widely credited as the origin of what we now call mushroom coffee. Decades later, the modern mushroom coffee wave was kicked off in part by a Finnish founder who'd heard about his grandparents' chaga brews and wondered what would happen if you brought the idea back on purpose.

The plot twist: now we drink them on purpose

For 200 years, coffee substitutes were what you drank because you had to. Today, millions of people drink them because they want to: to sleep better, to get off the 3 PM caffeine rollercoaster, to calm a stomach that doesn't love coffee's acidity, or just because they like the taste.

And here's the funny part. The coffee substitute ingredients people use today are almost exactly the ones history kept landing on:

Which brings us, a little sheepishly, to our own jar. Our caffeine-free mushroom coffee alternative is more or less a greatest-hits album of 240 years of coffee shortages: roasted chicory, barley, rye and dandelion root, plus chaga in the Finnish tradition, along with Lion's Mane, Cordyceps and Shiitake extracts and a little cacao and cinnamon. No blockade required.

If you're curious how the old-school options stack up against each other today, we ranked them in 9 caffeine-free coffee alternatives, ranked by how much they taste like coffee.

FAQ

What was used as a coffee substitute in the past?

Mostly roasted roots and grains: chicory, barley, rye, wheat and dandelion root. In harder times people roasted almost anything, including okra seeds, sweet potatoes, acorns, beets, peanuts and peas. In wartime Finland, people brewed chaga mushroom.

Why do people in New Orleans put chicory in their coffee?

The habit came from French coffee culture, which picked up chicory during Napoleon's blockade, and was cemented when the Union blockaded New Orleans during the Civil War. After the war, the rest of the country went back to pure coffee, but New Orleans kept the chicory.

What is Postum, and can you still buy it?

Postum is a caffeine-free roasted grain drink created by C.W. Post in 1895. Kraft discontinued it in 2007, and a smaller company revived it in 2012, so yes, it's available again.

What does "ersatz coffee" mean?

Ersatz is German for "replacement." Ersatz coffee, or Ersatzkaffee, was the roasted grain or chicory drink Germans relied on during the world wars, and the word entered English as a general term for a poor imitation.

Is chaga coffee real coffee?

Chaga brewed on its own is caffeine-free and isn't coffee at all; it's a mushroom tea with a coffee-like color and earthiness. Many modern "chaga coffee" products blend chaga with real coffee, so check the label if you're avoiding caffeine.

The bottom line

Every time the world took away coffee, people kept the mug and changed what went in it. Some of those substitutes deserved to be forgotten (we're looking at you, asparagus seeds). Others turned out to be so good that people kept drinking them long after the coffee came back.

Sources

• American Battlefield Trust: Coffee on the Home Front During the Civil War
• Emerging Civil War: Confederate Coffee Alternatives
• Royal Coffee: The History of Chicory
• Postum: Our Roots
• Atlas Obscura: Chaga Mushroom
• wissen.de (Wahrig): Origin of "Muckefuck"

These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This content is for general information and is not medical advice.