This is like asking: People who eat food for the calories, why don’t you just eat dry primate food pellets?
Because there’s a big upside to enjoying the experience of drinking coffee with few downsides. If coffee was just caffeine dissolved in water it’d be a very different story
Personally I only care about calories, I’m on board for food pellets if they actually worked and were healthy.
You may be a robot in that regard but you’re clearly aware that people enjoy the taste of food and coffee, right?
That’s why I said for the caffeine and not who enjoy coffee.
So you’re really asking about people who dislike coffee but drink it regularly anyway for caffeine? Are there a lot of people in this situation?
Me, unfortunately. Never picked up the taste for coffee, but I accidentally got hooked on caffeine through energy drinks, which are way worse for you. Now I’m trying to acquire the taste for coffee at a late stage to wean myself off energy drinks.
I say this as a coffee drinker: try tea. There’s way more flavor options to help you ease into it. Start with some fruity flavors and work your way toward the more bitter stuff (if you ever want to get there)
Drinking tea actually expanded my palate enough to learn how to enjoy black coffee. It wasn’t until I started brewing my own including cleaning the machine myself that it started coming out good enough to really look forward to.
Seconding the idea of tea. My schedule doesn’t allow the amount of bathroom breaks I would need if I consumed enough tea to get the caffeine I need, but I would prefer tea over anything else given the chance.
I learned to drink coffee with chocolate milk mixed in, then after a week black coffee was palatable. Parents drank excessive levels so it was always available, no one had milk or sugar in it so… I guess I learned it fast out of convenience :-)
You don’t have to dislike, you can be neutral about it, not care about it, you just drink it for the caffeine.
I’ve definitely met people like that when I was in college. It was pretty uncommon though
If energy drinks and tea weren’t a thing then yeah… but they are so I’m guessing not really. Then again if coffee were the only caffeine option I probably wouldn’t have a caffeine addiction…
Me. Milk and sugar makes it actually tasty.
I drink coffee mainly for the caffeine but I’d prefer to consume said caffeine via the most delicious method. Why NOT drink coffee if I also like the taste?
Your question is actually “people who drink coffee for caffeine even though they hate the taste, why not use caffeine pills?” which targets an extremely slim demographic
Soylent
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Same. I’d eat dog food if it hit my macros and tasted alright.
Bachelor Chow! now with flavor!!!
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The same reason smokers don’t just wear nicotine patches.
There’s much more to the ritual. The caffeine may be part of it, but pulling in the other senses: the flavor, the smell, the warm mug in your hands, all add up to much more than a dose of caffeine.
“People who X, why not Y?”
Y person: “Well akshully,”
I thought about that but two things. 1) nicotine patches don’t give you the same amount afaik. 2) There are more addicting things in cigarettes, people that switch to vaping (same nicotine) say it doesn’t hit as much. 3) also why I said for the caffeine instead of who enjoy coffee.
Most people that say “I just drink coffee for the caffeine” likely think that, but actually do like the coffee experience.
People who just want caffeine do indeed take caffeine pills
I do not know I like caffeine. But I like to drink coffee.
Do people know she or he likes caffeine or coffee?
Id bet for most that its a package deal. The coffee ritual is a fine thing on its own, but people generally start drinking coffee for “energy.”
After a while, you like the coffee and the energy.
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This. Vaping is both a blessing and curse when it comes to making the switch from reg cigs.
nicotine patches and lozenges are actually similarly great. Just low level nicotine for hours. If I don’t have enough water or am too tired to start with then they will cause low-grade nausea though.
it’s like drinking alcohol - you can go to a bar/pub for the social scene or you can pregame in the parking lot with a bottle of cheap vodka to get fucking wrecked first.
People who have sex for the orgasm, why don’t you just masturbate?
- Coffee smells good
- Coffee tastes good
- Coffee is warm and comforting
- Coffee is more socially acceptable than popping pills
- Caffeine pills are somewhat harder to find. I can’t order them at a restaurant.
Edit: I’ll point out that you’ll rarely find someone who only drinks coffee for the caffeine. For many (most?) it’s just a perk, or even an unfortunate side-effect, hence the popularity of decaffeinated coffee.
caffeine pills are easier to find. they come in the hundreds and then they’re just in your bag or coat or whatever.
essential for travel in my opinion. no running around in the morning trying to find a good coffee or suffering through the awful hotel room coffee maker.
A good cup of coffee is better than the pill, but often the pill is better than the coffee that is around and readily available
caffeine pills are easier to find
I have to disagree. Nearly all stores that sell caffeine pills, gas stations and pharmacies mostly, will also sell coffee in some form. Many workplaces, offices in particular, will have coffee available for free to employees. Even many waiting rooms and lounges at airports, train stations, even the lobby of the local mechanic have coffee available. Plus pretty much all restaurants and bars will have coffee.
If you limit yourself to only ‘good’ coffee then you may have a harder time, but that’s really got more to do with your personal preference than availability.
You’ve got a point that pills are easier to carry once you’ve got them, and your money goes a longer way with them. And they’re obviously easier than making a coffee yourself. To be clear, I’ve got no problem with pills, they just aren’t my go-to.
Are you really unable to function without caffeine to the point this be running around wasting your morning looking for a coffee?
It’s really interesting to me that it’s socially acceptable to be unable to deal without caffeine, and the source of many “light hearted” jokes about “ooooh, you don’t wanna meet me before my morning coffee!”.
I don’t think it’s necessarily a very bad thing but have you ever considered it and thought wow, I’m carrying my drugs with me in case I can’t get my drugs drink?
Drinking gives higher comfort levels than pill popping.
I personally find that coffee delivers caffeine in a way superior to pills or Red Bulls or whatever. Coffee gives you a better buzz. Red Bulls and pills are like concentrates to flower. The nuances are lost. quit scratching, my fucking chair Oliver. Edit : on the phone, so I use speech to text and my cat is a dick
Is Oliver your cat, orrrr-?
Yeah. He’s a cat. I’m not sure how he would feel if I said “my” cat but I’m the one he has charged with caring for all of his needs, including but not limited to, adding food to his bowl every morning even if it’s still full. I have to at the very least pretend to add food. Also, he doesn’t like to be petted or touched in general, so I’m not even sure what I’m getting out of this relationship.
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quit scratching, my fucking chair Oliver.
Keep scratching Oliver!! 🤣
I have a pocket full of pistachios that would like to have a word with you. And if you listen closely you may smell the candied pecans wailing in the distance.
I like the taste of coffee
I once took a huge number of No-Doz trying to get the same effect as adderall.
At about the two and a half hour mark I was driving through downtown Chicago toward my home, just openly puking on myself. I’d puked so many times I had finally stopped trying to pull over and open the door. I just needed to get home.
Home meant I could run a hot bath and huddle in it, rocking back and forth. I figured I’d be okay.
Then my fingers started to tingle and go numb. That scared me, so I called 911. Managed to get my boxers back on before the EMTs arrived and hauled me out into an ambulance.
At the hospital, they gave me a gown and a big cup of charcoal smoothie to drink. They wouldn’t release me until I’d had a psych eval. The shrink told me it looked like a suicide attempt. I told her no I was just trying to get high.
I remember saying “You know that feeling when you just have to get high on something?” She looked at me like I had two heads.
For the walk of shame/relief home, they found me a pair of blue scrubs that were comically small. Like they barely covered half my butt.
Discharged me and I walked home through the warm summer night, swerving like a drunk man, pausing every block do so to puke a stream of black sludge into the bushes.
It was fucking ridiculous and it turned me off of caffeine pills.
You poor bastard. Didn’t they check your heart rate and give you something to reduce it? I imagine with the amount of caffeine you’d absorbed you’d be tachycardic.
Of course they checked my heart rate. It was a hospital intake. They didn’t give me anything to reduce it though.
Such a weird question. If you eat to get sustenance, why eat tasty food carefully prepared and not fill it with ingredients blended into mush?
oh, you mean a smoothie. people do that too
Not with meat and bread.
Hold my dough, fam
You can put a lot of things in coffee…I can’t exactly mix whiskey with caffeine pills…
…or can you.
Don’t let your memes be dreams
If Red Bull and vodka… Monster and Jager… If they can do it, why not whiskey and caffeine
Dosing. You can order crystalline caffeine, but you have to take micrograms. If you overdose you could have a heart attack.
Availability, coffee is a social and calmly accepted drink wherever you go. Even if you can’t get coffee you can get tea. Finding pills is more troublesome.
Because liquid is consumed slowly because it’s hot, it’s easier to dose to the level of excitement you want. If you ingest a pill there’s a delay effect, so it’s easy to take too many pills before the impact hits you. Sipping hot coffee, you can get to the point where you’re just the right level of jittery and then stop
Caffeine is definitely dosed in milligrams not micrograms.
Typical doses of caffeine are in the high tens to low hundreds of milligrams, which is much easier to measure than micrograms. A potentially lethal dose for a healthy adult is around 10 grams, about a hundred times as much as one would typically take.
There have been incidents of people dying from caffeine powder overdoses; a tablespoon or so is dangerous, but it’s easy for anyone who understands what a typical dose looks like to not do that. If it would fit in a pill capsule, it won’t kill a healthy, non-hypersensitive adult.
You can buy a whole bag of caffeine pills that will last months.
Dosing on pills is more exacting than coffee which has variability per batch, so you can get the exact amount you want. You have an interesting point about stopping drinking though. You could also take a half pill. I wonder how that would play out with experienced people, if you know how much caffeine you want you can get that exact amount with pills, but you have to know already of time.
There’s also the ritual and social aspects.
Nothing stopping people from taking coffee pills. They’re pretty cheap. They just don’t
I do this all the time. I’ve gotten used to judging how I feel in the morning, and determining from that how much to take.
You really can’t decide by how much difference you feel right after taking a caffeine pill. If someone is going to keep taking one every 10 minutes until it kicks in, that would be deadly.
There’s a short lived placebo effect, then half an hour to 45 minutes later, after I’ve forgotten whether I took one or not, my energy suddenly ramps up. If I’ve taken more than I need for the day, it’s a bit of a ride that I just have to hang on for, it’s not going away until the chemicals are done doing chemistry with my brain.
There are also slow-release caffeine pills. It’s a slower, smoother ride up and down the energy boost, and more analogous to sipping a caffeinated drink through the day. But without needing to pee 2 or 3 quarts of water that would come with sipping enough drinks to reliably get 100-200mg of caffeine out of it.
I tracked down pills because I can’t stand the taste of coffee, so the whole ritual thing is ruined because I hate the stuff. Tea seems more variable in dosage, and energy drinks or Mtn Dew are too expensive both upfront and in long term health expenses.
Cause I like the smell, the taste, the warmth. Maybe if I had no time I would take caffeine pills, but the experience of a cup of coffee is nice.
coffee means I can take a shit at work
On top of all the things said in this thread, I would also add caffeine is a diuretic. The liquid in coffee offsets that side effect.
Have you had a good cup of coffee?
