I quit caffeine

Have never looked back and recommend you to do the same.

Before quitting I was drinking around 5 or 6 cups of coffee a day with around 2 teaspoons each. Any decrease in caffeine intake would give me a migraine, which lowered my desire to drink coffee, leading to migraines of 3 days in duration. A detox. And I was always on the edge, felt super restless without actually being able to eliminate this feeling.

Removing refined sugar from my diet is now priority #1, including chocolate and whatever contains it to enhance taste. Afterwards I may try fully quitting drinking coffee again, which shouldn't be that hard. It's just that it's a nice thing to be doing, like playing with a cigarette between the fingers and smoking it. You loose something if you remove this from the life, and what you gain isn't always that obvious. Well, the benefits of quitting smoking are easy to recognize, but it's harder with coffee.

I love coffee and I'd love to go back to drinking it, but I don't think I can. If you get frequent headaches/migraines, try cutting back on caffeine. You might be surprised.

While it wasn't really much of a caffeine thing for me, I did simply like the taste and the fact that it's warm, but once you see it for the watery slurry from a marginal blend of "we found some beans on a boat" factory that it is, your taste in coffee gets upgraded and as a result you end up drinking less because the good stuff is not always within reach.

Most people I meet at high quality espresso places have had a similar journey, generally from the crappy supermarket pre-ground stuff, to paper coffee pads to metal coffee pods to actual coffee at which point even the memory of an amazing Costa Rica natural at 93°C from a week ago is better than whatever an automatic machine can give you.

For me, the caffeine doesn't do the whole 'boost' thing, doesn't impede sleep either. Coffee does make me dry out faster and that's something other people tend to forget, mistaking a headache for coffee-related instead of dehydration. But I can often taste the difference in decaf processed coffee and I general it does a disservice to the bean.

On top of everything else, you don't really need a lot of coffee, and if large volumes of warm liquid is a joy in itself, we have things like infusions (ginger, mint, fruits, but also Rooibos) that doesn't really "do" anything but definitely make for a tasty hydrating drink.

Right now I just manually grind my coffee at home (weighing it of course and making sure the grind size is correct - coffee snobbery makes it more work to get a cup you like), and pour a V60 or make an aeropress.

Whenever I do want an espresso I'll go outside and visit my favourite espresso bar that can pull shots I'll never be able to make myself (unless I become a full-time barista I suppose).