History Main / Uncoffee

** Drinking hot Dr Pepper was an actual (short-lived) fad at the time. There were instructions on the can and everything! (It came back into the public consciousness in late 2023, when some Internet creators found out about it and had to try it. Max Miller of ''[[WebVideo/TastingHistoryWithMaxMiller Tasting History]]'' and Greg Titian of ''WebVideo/HowToDrink'' both sampled the stuff around December 2023.

** Drinking hot Dr Pepper was an actual (short-lived) fad at the time. There were instructions on the can and everything! (It came back into the public consciousness in late 2023, when some Internet creators found out about it and had to try it. Max Miller of ''[[WebVideo/TastingHistoryWithMaxMiller Tasting History]]'' and Greg Titian of ''WebVideo/HowToDrink'' both sampled the stuff around 2023.

** Drinking hot Dr Pepper was an actual (short-lived) fad at the time. There were instructions on the can and everything!

* [[MetaphoricallyTrue From a certain point of view]], many people have been known to sarcastically describe Decaf as “not real coffee,” since it omits what [[MustHaveCaffeine to many coffee drinkers]] is a key component of the experience.

* Having to rely on coffee substitutes (called ''[[CaptainErsatz Ersatzkaffee]]'' or ''[[InherentlyFunnyWords Muckefuck]]'') was also necessary in UsefulNotes/WestGermany during the post-[[UsefulNotes/WorldWarII war]] era, as well as in UsefulNotes/EastGermany during TheSeventies. The "seventies coffee crisis" (which did affect the West, but mostly ended up producing higher prices rather than scarcity per se) resulted from a bad harvest in Brasil and the GDR's notorious lack of hard currency with which to buy coffee. First they tried substituting coffee with the aforementioned products and then they invested in Vietnam, which at that time had an infant coffee industry at best, causing it to take a path towards the second biggest coffee producer in the world today, mostly focused on mass producing cheap varieties. To this day Germany and Vietnam enjoy surprisingly strong relations and ties of all sorts for two countries so far apart without a history of colonialism or a shared language between them.

** Chicory caught on, after a fashion; it's still an ingredient, though now mixed with real coffee. Coffee-chicory blends are popular in Louisiana, and especially popular in UsefulNotes/NewOrleans. To this day, Café du Monde serves New Orleans-style chicory coffee with its famous beignets. Perhaps significantly, New Orleans was captured by the Union relatively early in the war (in the spring of 1862), and so really only ever had to do with coffee substitutes as something to stretch war-affected supplies of real coffee rather than having to drink completely uncaffeinated sweet-potato/toasted grain/etc. "coffee" for the better part of four years.

* During UsefulNotes/TheAmericanCivilWar, Lincoln cut off the South's access to coffee supplies (coffee had to be imported by ship, and practically the first thing the Union did in the war was establish a general blockade of the South and its ports). Desperate, the Confederacy tried to make substitutes of anything that they could get their hands on. This included faux-coffee made from chicory, roasted dandelion root, and toasted grain, best of all. Worst of all being ''acorns''.

** Chicory caught on, after a fashion; it's still an ingredient, though now mixed with real coffee. Coffee-chicory blends are popular in Louisiana, and especially popular in UsefulNotes/NewOrleans.

* The humans in James P. Hogan's ''Literature/TheImmortalityOption'' drink coffee. The Borijans--the six-limbed birdlike aliens responsible for the [[MechanicalEvolution mechanical biosphere]] on Titan--on the other hand drink (or rather drank, as their planet was destroyed half a million years ago) ''graff'', made from a kind of dried seaweed. Justified in that they're six-limbed birdlike aliens from a planet that was destroyed half a million years ago.

** ''Literature/TheRestaurantAtTheEndOfTheUniverse'' parodies this effect, but instead of coffee, it's the alcoholic drink "gin and tonic" that gets this treatment, showing up instead as "jynnan tonnyx", a [[ThatSoundsFamiliar suspiciously similar name]] which the Guide itself immediately lampshades. In light of this, one wonders whether Douglas Adams drank a lot while writing... (Although a jynnan tonnyx actually tastes like a whisky and soda.)

* ''VideoGame/IWasATeenageExocolonist'': Blep tea, which gets its name from how bitter it is, but is still quite popular as a stimulant. It also has an AlienCatnip side to it, as an event in which a more potent variant is researched has the PlayerCharacter hesistate between giving it to someone who prefers the stimulant aspect and someone who prefers the drug-like aspect.

[[folder:PuppetShows]]
* Downplayed on an episode of ''Series/FraggleRock''. One Doozer serves another "a cup of the hot stuff." No word on whether it's a stimulant or has anything else in common with coffee.
[[/folder]]

* Downplayed on an episode of ''Series/FraggleRock''. One Doozer serves another "a cup of the hot stuff."

* Near the end of ''VideoGame/ConquestsOfCamelot'', you encounter an old sage who offers you a cup of "qahwah," and if you ask him about it, its description sounds exactly like coffee.

[[folder:Anime & Manga]]
* The Sand Kingdom in ''LightNovel/RestaurantToAnotherWorld'' has a drink called cafa which can be drank hot or cooled with magic. The rest of the other world have never heard of coffee, and visitors to the restaurant refer to it as a kind of tea.
[[/folder]]

* ''Literature/TheHitchhikersGuideToTheGalaxy'': Arthur spends a good chunk of the book trying to get a cup of tea out of the drink dispensers aboard the Heart of Gold, but they only provide Advanced Tea Substitute, a drink that tastes “almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.”

* ''Literature/TheRestaurantAtTheEndOfTheUniverse'' parodies this effect, but instead of coffee, it's the alcoholic drink "gin and tonic" that gets this treatment, showing up instead as "jynnan tonnyx", a [[ThatSoundsFamiliar suspiciously similar name]] which the Guide itself immediately lampshades. In light of this, one wonders whether Douglas Adams drank a lot while writing... (Although a jynnan tonnyx actually tastes like a whisky and soda.)

---->"Klingons have developed a way to make coffee particularly strong, both in flavour and in its effect as a stimulant, and it’s a very popular beverage. As a rule, coffee’s consumed plain - that is, black - but some Klingons prefer to mix other ingredients in with the coffee. If some kind of liquor is added to the coffee, the drink is called ra’taj. It’s said that the drink was originally nicknamed ra’wI’ taj (“commander’s knife,” suggestive of its potency), and that the name was shortened over time. In any event, ra’taj became one of the few Klingon foods to gain popularity outside the Empire, though in an altered form. Instead of containing liquor, as does the genuine Klingon ra’taj, the “export” version (which came to be pronounced in Federation Standard) consists of strong Klingon coffee plus a nutlike flavouring. Eventually, a new fashion developed - adding cream - and with this innovation came yet another name, modelled after the name of another popular coffee drink, cappuccino. Raktajino is now served hot or iced, with or without extra cream, and with or without the rind of some fruit to add even more flavour. Though it’s sometimes called “Klingon coffee,” it’s quite different from both plain coffee and the alcoholic ra’taj.
** In the episode where the crew goes back in time to "The Trouble With Tribbles", Odo (in disguise) distractedly asks the waitress for raktajino and then clarifies that it is Klingon coffee. She replies that they don't serve Klingon food and drink, and that he's the ''second'' person to ask for it, cluing him in that fugitive Darvin has passed that way.
* According to ''Series/StarTrekTheNextGeneration'' the Vulcans have a kind of "un-tea." Sarek's wife Perrin mentions, over a cup of mint tea with Picard, that the Vulcans also have "something they call mint," which apparently isn't as good as real Earth mint, or at least not quite the same.

* In the ''Literature/DragonridersOfPern'' books, everybody drinks klah, a drink brewed from the bark of a native tree, which is neither coffee or tea.[[note]]Which is stated to taste more like "cinnamony chocolate, with a touch of hazelnut and coffee."[[note]] It's stated in ''Dragonsdawn'' that the first two things human colonists always do on a new world are 1. find something that can be turned into booze and 2. find something that can be turned into a caffeinated drink. The second one is necessary because coffee plants won't grow successfully on any planet but Earth for some reason. And all the tea plants were consumed by Thread on Pern, in the First Fall.