Extra Shot | Bleak Times for Black Coffee Ep. 18

Posted in: Culture

By Extra Shot Audio Blog

Extra Shot | Bleak Times for Black Coffee Ep. 18

While the overall number of coffee drinkers has increased, the proportion opting for black coffee is declining. This trend raises questions about the future of black coffee in a market increasingly dominated by flavored and sweetened options.

Takeaways

Decline in black coffee consumption from 24% to 15% over ten years
Growth in coffee drinking overall despite black coffee decline
Shift towards sweeter, additive-laden coffee drinks
Generational differences in coffee preferences
Impact of marketing and consumer culture on coffee choices
Opportunities for roasters in a changing market
The role of specialty coffee in consumer trends
Comparison with wine and craft beer industry shifts

I'm feeling mighty lonesome

Haven't slept a wink

I walk the floor and watch the door

And in between I drink

Black coffee

First recorded in 1949 by Sarah Vaughan, the song “Black Coffee” has since been recorded with and without lyrics by dozens of musicians, including Ray Charles, Bobby Darin, k.d. lang, Sinéad O'Connor, and of course the one, the only, Ella Fitzgerald. The fact that this jazzy, blues-infused torch song became a classic, recorded by so many artists, speaks, I think, to the cultural iconography of black coffee as specific to certain moods and circumstances.

In this instance, black coffee stands in parallel with bitterness, anxiety, agitation, cynicism, and a hint of toughness. The song conveys a sense of resignation when it pairs caffeine and nicotine. The singers drown their “past regrets, in coffee and cigarettes,” a combination that was an old cliché even in 1949. In the song, as in the Jim Jarmusch movie over 50 years later, we have no doubt that coffee and cigarettes means black coffee and cigarettes.

This was the black coffee of my youth, consumed by hardboiled detectives, soldiers, truckers, lonely insomniacs, poets on the road, and the Marlboro Man. It was a taste acquired through habitual necessity of one sort or another.

When I finally started drinking coffee in my late twenties, I drank mochas exclusively—pie in a cup. It wasn’t until I went to work at the Specialty Coffee Association of America at age 35 and was surrounded by people who drank black coffee for the pleasure of it that I acquired the appreciation myself. That was 28 years ago, almost to the day as I write these words, and I can’t remember the last time I had a mocha.

For those of us who work in the specialty coffee industry outside of a retail context, this is common. It can seem like the whole world drinks coffee black. If you work for an importer or roaster, it’s likely that most of the people around you are drinking their coffee black much, if not all, of the time. But out in the “real” world, the number of people who consider black coffee one of their options on any given day are a minority among coffee drinkers. And that minority appears to be shrinking.

In 2015, 24% of coffee drinkers said black coffee was one of the ways they consumed coffee on any given day. Ten years later, in 2025, that number had dropped to 15%.

If you think I’m using some odd phrasing here, I’m not being coy. Please see my endnote “Notes on Research Design.”

In any case, looking at the drop from 24% to 15% over 10 years' number alone, it appears that black coffee consumption might be going the way of the dodo. But why would we look at one statistic alone when we know better than that?

According to the National Coffee Association, the percentage of adults drinking coffee daily was 59% in 2015. That grew to 66% in 2025. I don’t want to do math in public, so you’ll have to trust me when I tell you this means that 35 million people could be drinking black coffee on any given day in 2015 and in 2025 that number was 26.4 million people.

While this is a loss of 8.6 million potential daily black coffee drinkers over 10 years in absolute terms, it may not signal a pending dodo day on the horizon. It does signal what everyone in the coffee industry already knows: the vast majority of the 30 million daily coffee drinkers we’ve gained between 2015 and 2025 use additives in their coffee.

A significant chunk of Gen X started drinking coffee in the 1990s, when we were more than doubling the number of coffeehouses in operation every two years. Traditionally, the number of people drinking black coffee grows within a segment of the population as it ages. That’s still the case—just to a lesser extent—as those who’ve spent most of their lives drinking what is, compared to previous generations, a myriad of coffee, milk, and sugar combinations, move through mid-life. The explosion in various cold coffee concoctions, typically consumed with additives, only emphasizes the relative shrinkage in black coffee consumption.

So, while it would be unfair to say black coffee is on the precipice of an extinction event, we cannot deny that a type of entropy is in play. When I first entered the coffee industry the “common wisdom,” right or wrong, was that roughly a third of coffee drinkers drank their coffee black. But this is an old assumption from the days when the only readily available options to black coffee were coffee and milk, coffee and sugar, or coffee with milk and sugar, a “regulah” in my neighborhood. Today, if you walk into a restaurant where 10 people are drinking coffee, statistically speaking only one or maybe two of them on some days might be drinking their coffee black. But there might be a sliver of hope if you’re inclined to hope about such things as black coffee consumption. In 2026, entropy paused and we gained 120,000 daily black coffee drinkers. Like I said, it’s only a sliver of hope.

In any case, the overall trend begs the question: What does this all mean and what might this mean for specialty coffee roasters?

Now would be a good time to bring in other voices so I asked Rob Stephen and Todd Mackey to have a conversation with me about these shifts in consumption behavior...

Todd

I'm kind of shocked that black coffee consumption has continued to go down. I don't even think, until you would put hard numbers in front of me, that I would have believed that. Since my inception in specialty coffee I've been so sort of embroiled, baked into a little segment of it that was fixated on trying to propose that people enjoy and appreciate unadulterated coffee.

Mike

We talk about this all the time, this sort of myopia that we get in specialty coffee. I write about this in the article, how everybody around me here today is drinking black coffee and when I worked for a coffee roaster everybody around me was drinking black coffee. So that's the prism that I see the world through.

Todd

I think it's interesting. On the one hand, I'm not surprised because, just speaking as a resident of Providence, Rhode Island, someone who's in cafes with regularity and just observing what their core products and offers are, if there are long lines for people getting drinks, and what you see walking away.

It seems that the most excitement right now in the specialty coffee space, and I use air quotes because there's always been this debate, is specialty coffee the type of coffee and how it's made, or is it what goes inside of it? Since the days of the Central Perk, Rob would know, that was at one time your favorite show, Friends.

Rob

Yes, the one where Rob watched it.

Todd

That type of cafe became really massive with Gen X's kind of coming alongside coffee and the expansion of the whole idea of coffee houses. Specialty coffee was a section of the menu that would, you know, in most ways had less coffee in it. These specialty drinks are seasonal and high input and high price. These are the cafes making money and growing right now. I'm surprised from where I sit because the whole point is black coffee. But then I zoom out and I look at the people who are making money and expanding and there's this sort of weird, interesting relationship with the marketing machine where it also allows for a constant flow of new stuff to talk about and to pull people in with.

What does that all mean? Does it tell one story? I think as with most things, two things can be true. There is a more voracious and deeply entrenched black coffee drinking culture that is found deep on Reddit feeds and in the hyper prosumer type of spaces. And simultaneously, I think average coffee drinkers are drinking sweeter, bigger, more kind of amended, let's call it, rather than adulterated types of drinks.

Mike

I think just by mentioning the word Reddit you explain why there's been a drop of almost nine million black coffee drinkers.

Rob

I guess to counterpoint, I'm not surprised. I have a fifty-thousand-foot view and a one that's closer in. On the larger view, we've been saying this for decades now that when it comes to traditional coffee drinkers, they're aging out. It's just a simple generation thing. I remember having a conversation with a person who was about fifteen years older than me and they told me that when they were being raised part of their manners education was to learn to drink black coffee because you don't want to show up at someone's house and ask them for other stuff. When they offer you coffee, you don't want to be like, do you have this? Do you have that? You should just learn how to drink black coffee because that's how people make it in their kitchen. I was like, wow, that's a generational thing because I certainly don't think that way and I know younger generations don't think that way. As a matter of fact, you get dinged as an Airbnb if you're hosting your place and you don't have milk in the fridge. I think that the people who drink black coffee reflexively, whether it's because of necessity or because that was just a thing to do, there are less and less of them just because they're aging out.

You told me you used to work at a company where you looked around and everyone was drinking black coffee. I used to work at a company that had thousands of stores. I would look around at an office of 500 people and I'm the only one drinking black coffee. I think if you look at the broad swath of consumers and you don't just go into specialty, then yeah, I think most people don't drink black coffee. When it relates to specialty culture, I used to say I spend my whole life trying to find coffee that's coffee flavored so therefore I don't want to put anything in it.

I want to experience it the way it's supposed to be experienced, my personal opinion turning into a semi-fact. But as the industry has moved forward, the specialty industry was co-opted or became part of or just hitched a ride along and became part of the beverage industry and the beverage industry is much more about not what you should do, but what you want to do. Consumers are driving. And if consumers are in a world with so much choice and so much availability of customization of everything that having it plain is almost like, why are you doing that? You don't have to. You can put whatever you want in it. If you want it with squirrel toes, you can have it. So I think that specialty coffee roasters, especially the people who have cafes are, Why would you do that? And they don't want to hear the answer, it’s because we can.

We've gone through so much effort to make this so good but it's part of the beverage industry now. I always cringe at the wine to coffee comparisons, but if you even look at beer, the original brands, like the Millers, they're all coming back. And the brew pubs that made 15 kinds of IPAs, they're closing. People are moving towards a more mass-market experience as comfort, which I think for the younger generation is coffee with dairy. Period. And then that's their baseline. If we don't have milk in the house, we're not having coffee today. So it's happening that way with beer. I think you're seeing a lot of these crazy types of wines are going away and vineyards are closing and stuff like that. Both industries have their crazy high end experimental stuff that some people like, but most people their baseline is flat. I think that the specialty coffee industry is a victim of its own success. We taught people to appreciate coffee, but then they moved on past that, they didn't stop at what I told you was right. They have their own thoughts of what they want to do.

So if you're buying green coffee or roasting or you have your own shop, you have a point of view on coffee. I made this or I participated in making this and I made decisions and here is the product of my decisions. And someone tastes it and goes, Great, where's the milk? You know what I mean? It's like, ow, right? I mean I just think that that's something we all have to wrestle with.

Todd

But I don't think consumers are on their own in doing that. With what I was saying about which cafes are growing that specialty drink side of their menu, I think that those things are comparable to some of the stuff that made the natural wine segment explode alongside specialty cocktails, alongside craft beer and the number of breweries and the number of skews each brewery is brewing.

Last week I was going through an awesome specialty roaster and cafe in the Denver area, Huck. They were making a seasonal coffee cherry soda. Delicious. Super refreshing. It was like a cold brew base, house made cherry syrup, and soda water. Delicious. This is not unusual anymore. Some of this flows out of preferences and whether that's dairy or sweet profile, what have you. It also allows for expression, employee engagement. It allows for some differentiation, who makes the best XYZ. It's a whole lot easier if you're like, hey, I had this drink that was undiscovered until I went to this place. If you can get one of those in a three-month time span on your specialty menu, you have something. If you're getting something that's like, wow, I can only get this, such and such, XYZ, an ingredient, iced latte at a certain place.

Mike

Wait, if craft breweries are closing and traditional beers are on the increase in terms of consumption, and fancy wines or odd wines or whatever are also trending downward, wouldn't that say in special coffee that black coffee would be trending up?

Rob

Well, here's where I would come in with that. I don't want to single out, but let's just say all the big coffee chains, say the top five or six. That’s, say, fifty thousand cafes and all of them have prominently on their menu non-coffee products geared towards junior high and up and they're fruit flavored and they're milk flavored and they're sweet, sweet, sweet, sweet. It’s the training of the palate from an early age, when you drink a beverage from one of our chains, it will be sweet and it will be interesting. Black coffee is the antithesis of that. At no point are you creating a future black coffee drinker by doing that. No.

Mike

So, for you it's just demographics that coffee has access to younger consumers.

Todd

You're seeing something else in wine and beer and what they're experiencing, which is a real fall, for the first time in a number of generations, a fall away from drinking alcohol, which is one part a health-conscious consideration. And then on top of it, you have the first adult generation at least in the US, where Cannabis is a legal product and you have a huge divergence of those things. I think that there's that, people not wanting to drink as much alcohol, not being as attracted to it. I think this indulgence almost ramps up in that type of case and it’s not comparable because you're not talking about intoxication. You're not talking about a clear health issue. So I think there are some things you can compare, but I think in that particular angle it falls apart.

But really what does it mean for the roaster? I think that it's interesting because it coincides with a time when it's hard to buy coffee. It has been very difficult. What is available? What price can I get? What qualities? I think the good news in this moment is in most cases, if it hasn't already begun, it's certainly a corner that you turn or you or you have to, a fork in the road, you decide that you're not going down that road at all. But a huge portion of the vast majority of specialty coffee roasting businesses eighty plus percent fall within what we'd call a blend bucket. Whether that's one or numerous, or one raw ingredient bucket that is bagged with several different labels in some cases. It should be a lever you can pull to then simplify through a flow of ingredients for seasonality's sake, take advantage of buying opportunities and use flexibility to your advantage to not overbook at times where pricing may not be an advantage.

That's certainly where I would see that going. If you're a roaster, even if you're hesitant to sort of accept this prevailing narrative, it does present a very good strategic set of opportunities.

Rob

The original thought behind our branded products, so we're talking about Brazil Eagle, Colombia Dulima, Guatemala Jabiru, Peru Kovachi, Mexico Ki-Saya, was that these would be, with an accessible price point, very stable in their in their flavor profile, with the understanding that you're going to blend with these, but they will be good enough to stand on their own for that occasional black coffee drinker. I'm not unhappy to encounter any of those black, but I would expect that the vast majority of the stuff that we sell under those marks ends up with milk in them, because they're an accessible price point and they do exactly what you just said, Todd? If you're the average roaster, you're going to put eighty percent of your volume into blends. That's what they're for, but if someone drinks them black, they'll stand up.

It's also about what you're used to. I just got back from vacation and I spent the last week of it in South Carolina. These beach communities all have these like breakfast places and on a Saturday there's a line out the door, that kind of thing. I went with my family and we had a beautiful breakfast. I got a cup of coffee and of course I ordered it black and I had exactly one half of one sip. It went right back down on the table and I was like, Well, I am not going to be a black coffee drinker today. So it's also about what's out there. I think even black coffee drinkers will opt out if they can't find what they're used to.

Notes on Research Design

Strictly speaking, the NCA does not ask people about their daily coffee drinking habits, they ask people about the coffee they consumed “yesterday,” which they refer to as “past day penetration.” Not only is this how the NCA has asked questions for decades, but it provides more accurate data than would a question asking consumers to generalize about their coffee drinking habits, questions for which the answer is inevitable “it depends.” First they ask the somewhat comprehensive “What did you drink yesterday during each of the following times? This may include any beverage that you drank at home or outside your home and may have come in a cup, can or bottle.” This question alone provides nine pages in the report and hundreds of data points. This is a multiple choice question and respondents are asked to “all that apply.” Later in the survey respondents are asked “What, if anything, was added to this coffee you had yesterday? Select all that apply.” They are presented the following options: