Sweetening your coffee

That's just brilliant! You will save yourself at least 30 strokes. Well done, Dale. Will you be increasing your exercise elsewhere to compensate?

Why thank you But, it's not everyday

By actual calculation, over the next six years I've been allowed, the time saved will yield time for 3 hours' additional yardwork

I myself always enjoyed the sweet kindness of liquid cyclamate. Quickly it did dissolve, merging with the goodness of whatever it had been added to.


Then the lousy FDA decided it might kill us all and ripped it off the shelves.


My coffee for the most part however, I prefer to be black. Straight up, no add-ons.

Allergic to honey so that won't be an issue.


Glad you made the discovery, it will I am sure make things a little better and brighter hereon in.

I have found after several decades of sweetening my coffee, that it tastes much better if I don't sweeten it at all, and also I can now detect the differences between types of bean and between cheap and premium coffee.

Oh if it were only true thatthat the taste of just plain coffee beans gives me pleasure. In some things I've champagne tastes with (barely) a beer budget.

The Beans
Gevalia (mail order): Kenya, med. roast. My neighbor's gift about every 6 weeks
Gevalia: Expresso Roast
Coffee Fool: (mail-order) Ecuadorian, light-med roast

Sweetner:
I can forego any sweetener now but it took awhile. During this last year I went from Raw (Turbinado) sugar, to raw honey...to plain black.

I think I make a darned good cup of coffee...for people that really like coffee.

Yep. I noticed long ago that adding sugar to coffee made it taste different. Not just being obviously sweeter, but different. I haven't tried honey and don't plan to.

I don't recommend it to anyone who just wants their coffee sweeter. For those without allergy to honey, raw unfiltered honey's taste is far superior to reg honey. I dislike reg honey comparatively. Honeymakers pasteurize (heat) and filter and take some of the good flavor and trace nutrients away; however, it was an easy habit to break because of the cost factor.

Black coffee from freshly ground beans just before brewing is a bit of heaven.

Big calorie advantge

You have my most sincere sympathies

Thanks Stur, it's not everyday….

Tho they don't drink much coffee I envy my two sons' most exquisite palate, their ability to distinguish various beer flavors

Depends on the quality of the coffee for me, and my coffee purchases are on the cheapo side these days. I used to drink the good stuff black, now I add something like 1/2 teaspoon of sugar and that will take refilling/topping off. Takes the edge off of miserable coffee.

Being a Lipton's tea child (no milk), I was late, as a teen, to learn to drink coffee, since all my elders or peers wanted me to add some kind of milk to it. Yetch. It turned out to be the milk I didn't like. I was one of those kids who had to sit at the table until I finished my milk. My mother nearly force fed me really icky calcium discs... (poor me).
I didn't learn to easily drink a glass of white milk until they came out with skim, whatever that year was. I finally learned to drink coffee black at the hospital I worked at after school classes - I saw other people doing that.

Years have gone by and I have changed. Yetch to skim milk, fat is needed for vitamin D absorption. Plus, I'm not chubby anymore and some fat on the body is a good protectant. We all have our nutritional views, these are some of mine.

I got used to caffe lattes in italy and am predictably ms. picky about my lattes - doppio and no damned milk foam on top of the milk, please, and no sugar at all. I'm fine with the bit of brown foam that comes with a correctly served espresso, and the dribbles of foam on a macchiato, a mere breath. Oh, and I'll add some sugar to straight espresso. Not like some italians. I remember going to a famously good coffee bar in Rome and they put the sugar in for me (yaaaack! four spoonfuls fast!). I learned how to control that, politely. Plus, that was only that one place.

I've also turned to almond milk or coconut milk, though I will still buy half and half, to have around if I want to make gelato, or my faux Alfredo sauce.

On stirring, it is my opinion from my own non-double blind testing efforts that baking cocoa powder stirs more easily into a little water first and then almond milk than doing the same with cow milk - this being for smoothies, not coffee related,
This could be fantasy.

One more thing, maybe from that first italy trip or maybe not - it might have also related to my reading - I got used to eating way less sugar than I had before that. Came home to find bakery goods, etc., all too sweet back in Los Angeles.

Stay tuned for "As The Coffee Mug Fills".

Congrats on superior palate

I wish I could distinguish brews like your facility with the bean

Myself Rag, I like it tho I don't have the educated palate of some

Wonder if using agave syrup would have a different result. It takes a lot less of it to achieve the same level of sweetness.

I bought some raw honey at Costco, get on years ago but it was a fairly big bottle. Like it, still have some of it, use it sparingly when I make my batches of granola. Not that I make granola often, but when I do, I sometimes use a little of that honey. The granola recipes out there on the internet are miles too sweet for me, usually doesn't need any.

One more comment - My estonian american friend gave me a present something like thirty years ago of a pound of Gevalia coffee and two Gevalia cups.
The coffee didn't knock me over then, but it certainly wasn't bad. I broke one of the cups after, oh, twenty years, and broke the second one fairly recently.

I've thought of starting a coffee mug thread; I still might do that... not so much for funny ones but those we are sentimental about (also, possibly funny).

Oops..I missed that one. That, too, was one of the better phases of sweetening. I liked agave nectar/syrup and it tastes just fine in a small dosage..about 1/2 tsp in a 10-oz cup of cawffee. I tried real 100% maple syrup (dark amber). No amount tasted right to me. Fast fwd on that one.

I was given a gift of a French press pot. I have used this press pot on occasion...heating the water in a pan just off a rolling boil. It uses a screen mesh (no filter). The taste is a bit above the drip coffee maker....releasing those subtle flavors of the bean. It's a little both of a bother prep-wise...but it sure solves some taste problems added by drip coffeemakers.

One of the personal experiences that kind of shocked me...is that certain (by no means all) of the premium coffees are less acidic (with plenty of depth/aroma) and have less irritation to my stomach. It's theorized that there's less pollution or chemicals that yield gastro irritation problems. So far, Gevalia leads the pack for me in this category. FWIW I grind all beans just before brewing.

Thanks Oss, I'm continually amazed by the depth of experience exhibited by many an a2k

Incidentally speaking of prep time, because the typical honey dispenser is so slow, esp in the wintertime, try the wide-mouth jar that will accommodate a teaspoon