There’s nothing like a fresh coffee in the morning, awakening your senses for the rest of the day. That first cup of Joe prepares many of us for the day, so it had better be a good one. However, there’s more to a good cup of coffee than just having a powerful caffeine kick.
Coffee type, roast level, brewing method, and extraction time all affect the experience and effects of a morning cup of coffee.
In this read, we’ll cover what you should look for when picking the best morning coffee for your taste, so you can find your perfect start of the day.
What’s the Best Morning Coffee?
The best morning coffee should pack a potent caffeine hit and produce charismatic flavors and aromas that suit your senses.
The best morning coffee can differ depending on personal taste — here’s what to look for when finding the best coffee to start your day:
- Robusta Coffee — Robusta coffee is bold, rich, and dark. This is the best option if you want a “turbo” coffee that’s guaranteed to give you a boost on those misty mornings. A 100% robusta coffee has twice the amount of caffeine as arabica coffee.
- Arabica Coffee — Coffee from arabica beans is smooth, sweet, and creamy. Although 100% arabica coffee contains less caffeine than robusta, it’s more than capable of waking you up in the morning. This is a good option for people who prefer mellow flavor profiles.
- Coffee Blends — Blends offer the best of arabica and robusta. A well-balanced blend provides the potent caffeine hit of peaberry robusta, the bold flavors of regular robusta, and the mellow sweetness of arabica.
- Brewing Methods — Finding the right brewing method is essential. If you like strong, concentrated coffee, opt for espresso shot, moka pot, or Aeropress blend. If you prefer a bold, warm cup, opt for drip-maker, pour-over, or French press. If you want a way to wake up in the summer, go for a cold brew or iced coffee.
- Instant Coffee — If you’re on a tight schedule and don’t have time to grind beans fresh and brew coffee, instant coffee is a good option. An instant espresso blend offers a strong, concentrated coffee, and instant lattes provide a no-hassle, creamy caffeine hit.
How to Choose The Best Morning Coffee
For that first cup of coffee in the morning, we all might want something a little different. For some, the meditative contemplation of a slow, drip-brewed black coffee is perfect for starting the day. For others, a quick takeout coffee with plenty of syrup is their ideal beverage.
Let’s take a look at some of the main things that can make a cup of coffee great for the morning:
1. Caffeine Content
Caffeine is perhaps the most important substance in coffee for the morning. Caffeine is a stimulant — it blocks adenosine which is the hormone responsible for making you feel tired [4].
Robusta coffee beans have almost twice as much caffeine as arabica beans, making them ideal for making strong morning coffee. For those who are more sensitive to caffeine arabica coffee beans are a better option.
2. Strong Flavors
Waking up is as much about the chemical influence on your body’s hormones as it is about your perception of being awake. As such, many people find the intense flavor of coffee to be a great wake-up signal. Getting those intensely bitter notes on your tongue can serve as a gentle and pleasant shock, allowing you to wake up a little more with each sip.
A dark roast coffee is the perfect way to get these strong flavors. During the roasting process, the Maillard reaction takes place. This is where heat from roasting breaks down the structure of the beans, leading to an increase in sugars [3].
Roasting coffee produces rich, dark, and smoky flavors and aromas. These characteristic coffee flavors and scents can be enough to provide a “placebo-like” boost in the morning.
3. Versatility
One characteristic that we often neglect to look for when purchasing coffee at the supermarket is versatility. The flavor of the coffee should suit any season or format — your “everyday” coffee should be ideal for both a strong, black coffee in the depth of winter, as well as a milky iced coffee during summer.
4. Bean Type
Different types of coffee beans offer a range of different flavors for your morning brew. Here’s how the two most popular options (robusta and arabica) stack up.
A) Robusta
Naturally darker and with a bold flavor, Robusta beans are typically roasted dark. This is done to ensure the maximum sweetness is bought out of the bean, which brings a smooth, rounded, and finished flavor to the final cup. Robusta beans have twice as much caffeine as arabica beans, so this may make them a superb morning coffee option!
B) Arabica
Arabica beans have a higher sugar and fat content than robusta beans, which means that their flavors can be more complex and delicate. For this reason, arabica beans are often roasted to a lighter degree than robusta so that more of their natural plant-derived flavors can be maintained.
C) Blends
Coffee blends can offer the best of both worlds, with the natural darkness and richness of the robusta beans being complemented by the delicate complexity of the arabica beans.
Some blends also include other beans, such as peaberry robusta, or liberian blend. Blends could be a winning choice if you’re looking to start your day with something complex and elegant.
4. Roasting Levels
Roasting coffee brings the flavors out of the bean, as well as developing new ones. Different roasts are favored by different people.
Here’s how they compare:
A) Light Roast
While both a light roast and a dark roast can be perfectly delicious in black coffee, you may find that a light roast coffee doesn’t pair well with milk. The acids and delicate aromatic flavors in a lighter roast can be lost or lead to a poor flavor when combined with dairy. For obvious reasons, a milk drink that tastes a bit sour isn’t what people want to start their day with.
The natural complexity of a light roast can shine through when drunk first thing in the morning. Offering the caffeine you need to bring you out of that last stage of sleep, a light roast can wake you with citrus, berry, and stone fruit notes.
B) Medium Roast
Medium roasts can be a great way to strike a balance between the richness of a dark roast and the brightness of a light roast. A skillfully blended medium roast will include both of those flavor notes, with the overall tasting notes often including nuts and maple syrup, too.
C) Dark Roast
As a roast continues for a long time, water inside the beans evaporates. When a roast takes more time, more of the acidic compounds dissolved in that water can be lost [5]. This means that in a dark roast, which has spent a long time being processed, the acidity of the coffee is typically lower than in a light roast.
However, a dark roast is typically a lot sweeter and richer than a light roast. When roasted with care and attention, a great dark roast will have gone through the Maillard reaction. This is where chemicals from within the bean change under exposure to heat, forming new flavors. In the case of coffee, this means sweetness — the carbohydrates from the bean degrade to simple sugars, which caramelize during roasting [3].
5. Organic Growing Practices
Organic growing practices can ensure that the beans don’t take on any chemicals that may be sprayed across crops on most monoculture farms. Choosing organically grown coffee is a great way to avoid these chemicals.
Outside of avoiding harmful chemicals, organic growing practices also ensure that the bean is given the time it needs to grow and mature. The coffee bean sits within the coffee cherry, and when grown organically, these cherries are not artificially ripened to ensure a fast profit. Instead, they’re allowed to gently age into having succulent, complex flavors.
6. Mold-Free
When dealing with coffee beans, mold growth can be an issue. More specifically, mycotoxins (chemicals produced by mold) can find their way into processed beans that are improperly dried. To ensure that crops are healthy and do not contain these contaminants, reputable companies will test for mold and certify the beans “mold-free.”
7. Coffee Origin
The place where your coffee beans are grown has a huge impact on their final flavors. There are many places in which good coffee can be found, but the most uniquely ideal is the central Vietnamese highlands known for producing robust coffee.
Coffee grown there benefits from distinct dry and rainy seasons, as well as cooler temperatures from the altitude. Both of these factors make the coffee plants produce large yields in predictable patterns, allowing growers to harvest freshly ripe cherries. Furthermore, the location boasts volcanic soil rich in minerals — the coffee plants benefit from this fertile soil, leading to fruit and seeds enriched by healthy growth.
What Can You Add to Morning Coffee?
Now that we’ve discussed what makes the specific beans we’re using ideal, let's discuss how we might doctor up our coffee to create the perfect beverage for our tastes:
1. Milk
Of course, many people add different types of milk to their coffee, with the most common likely being dairy milk. You could also add a plant-based option for something vegan-friendly and for a new, balanced flavor. A great choice in this regard is soy milk — it has a naturally nutty flavor that interacts well with the richness of well-brewed coffee.
Another fascinating addition is one to three tablespoons of condensed milk per cup — an ingredient often used in Vietnamese Coffee. Condensed milk has a very rich and sweet flavor, and adding it to a strong, dark coffee creates a wonderfully complex drink.
The caramel-like flavors of condensed milk bring a developed sweetness to coffee, and it’s common in Vietnam to see brews being made directly into glasses containing a little condensed milk.
2. Butter
Adding butter to coffee typically means one of two things — butter-roasted coffee beans in the traditional Vietnamese style or bulletproof coffee.
Bulletproof coffee — or “butter coffee” — is widely considered to have been invented by Dave Asprey, though he came up with the idea after seeing the traditional Himalayan practice of adding butter to tea. Because of the harsh cold of the Himalayas, as well as the high altitude at which drinkers were living, tea drinkers needed the additional calories.
Asprey popularized butter coffee in the late 2000s, insisting that it has several mental and physical benefits for anyone who drinks it. For butter coffee lovers, the consensus is that it can increase your mental and physical energy levels and improve your mental clarity and focus.
3. Sugar
Adding sugar to your coffee gives you energy in the simplest way possible — calories. Sugar is an efficient way to give yourself a little energy boost because it's mostly made up of glucose. Glucose is a simple type of carbohydrate, which means that your body can quickly break it down and use it for energy.
While adding a lot of sugar to your food can be unhealthy, adding a little in moderation and as part of a balanced diet can be perfectly safe and perfectly tasty.
4. Spices
While adding spices to your coffee might seem a little unorthodox, cinnamon, cardamon, and nutmeg make great additions to coffee.
These spices can add a general warmth and sweetness to the drink. Plus, if your drink is generally sweeter, then you may be less inclined to add sugar and cream, leading to an altogether healthier beverage.
Related: How to Make Mexican Coffee (Café de Olla): Step-By-Step Guide
FAQs: Best Morning Coffee
Now that we’ve been able to talk about the wonders of a great cup of coffee in the morning let's go through some quick FAQs.
1. What Is the Best Morning Coffee?
This is a matter of taste! A quick and easy instant espresso can give you a strong, flavorful, and nutritionally dense cup of coffee that can boost your brain into top gear at the start of the day.
2. What Makes Coffee Good for the Morning?
For most people, their morning brew has to be intensely caffeinated and intensely flavorful. Both of these characteristics can be found in robusta coffee beans, which have an earthy flavor and tons of caffeine.
3. How Can You Boost Your Morning Brew?
There are plenty of ways to make your first cup of the day a little better than it would naturally be. A great choice could be to add a spoonful of honey. In addition to adding some delicious sweetness, honey has a number of healthful properties that could give you a helping hand first thing in the morning [6].
4. How Should You Brew Your Morning Coffee?
While you can brew any way you would like, if you’re hoping for maximum caffeine, then aiming for a high-extraction brewing method would be ideal. Therefore, you might choose to brew with an espresso machine or a moka pot — the high pressure typically leads to increased extraction.
You could also choose to brew with a Vietnamese phin filter — this traditional brewer offers slightly less pressure but balances that with a long brew time to create very high extraction.
5. What Should You Look for in a Morning Coffee?
We might suggest that the best thing to look for in a morning coffee is great flavor. It’s worth tracking down a roast or origin that you might like and then experimenting to hone in on the flavors and characteristics you enjoy.
6. When Is the Best Time to Drink Coffee in the Morning?
While there’s no hard and fast rule for drinking your coffee in the morning, there may be an ideal moment to feel the benefit.
When you wake up, your body produces cortisol to disrupt sleep and awaken you. Most people experience a slump in their cortisol levels between 9:30 and 11 am, so opting for a strong cup around that time may be particularly beneficial to you.
References:
- Jakaria, M., Haque, M. E., Kim, J., Cho, Y., Kim, S., & Choi, K. (2018). Active ginseng components in cognitive impairment: Therapeutic potential and prospects for delivery and clinical study. Oncotarget, 9(71), 33601.
- Giesbrecht, T., Rycroft, J. A., Rowson, M. J., & De Bruin, E. A. (2010). The combination of L-theanine and caffeine improves cognitive performance and increases subjective alertness. Nutritional neuroscience, 13(6), 283–290.
- Redgwell, R. J., Trovato, V., Curti, D., & Fischer, M. (2002). Effect of roasting on degradation and structural features of polysaccharides in Arabica coffee beans. Carbohydrate research, 337(5), 421–431.
- Institute of Medicine (US) Committee on Military Nutrition Research. Caffeine for the Sustainment of Mental Task Performance: Formulations for Military Operations. Washington (DC): National Academies Press (US); 2001. 2, Pharmacology of Caffeine. Available from:
- Awwad, S., Issa, R., Alnsour, L., & Albals, D. (2021). Quantification of Caffeine and Chlorogenic Acid in Green and Roasted Coffee Samples Using HPLC-DAD and Evaluation of the Effect of Degree of Roasting on Their Levels. Molecules, 26(24), 7502.
- Samarghandian, S., Farkhondeh, T., & Samini, F. (2017). Honey and Health: A Review of Recent Clinical Research. Pharmacognosy Research, 9(2), 121.
