The point of coffee is caffeine. If coffee didn't have caffeine it would be some boring curiosity tucked away in specialty markets. Same with beer, wine, and spirits; it's the alcohol. This is why people still buy Folgers, Pabst, and Night Train: they get the job done for cheap.
Yeah, this is not true. This is the type of argument that people make when they insist that "no one actually likes IPAs and they just want to get drunk quicker."
No, people like IPAs because they taste good to them. I have never heard anyone complementing the flavorings of Pabst (yuk), Schaefer (worst beer I ever tasted), or Milwaukee's Best (aka The Beast). Same with Old English 800 or Colt 45, they're awful but get you drunk for cheap.
As a former home brewer, when I taste a ton of hops, the first thing that pops into my mind is "oh they screwed up the batch" because a fistfull of hops was a way to wipe out bad flavors and save material.
As a home brewer, just because one person tried to salvage crap by dumping hops into the boil does not automatically make all hoppy styles crap. Perhaps more forgiving for less-experienced brewers, but doing them well still takes skill.
It's one of those things so common and spoken about among brew clubs that I saw it as an established truth. We always gave the PNW brewers crap for over reliance on hops. In the time and place I was at, porters and stouts ruled.
The hardest thing to brew at home is actually a pale ale or a light lager. You can't hide any mistakes in those because they are 'sex in a canoe' beers.
Well, I reckon whether one considers that statement true or not depends on who one is (as I'll explain).
Coffee, tea, chocolate and cola all contain mixtures of methylxanthines of which caffeine is but one, others include theophylline, theobromine† and paraxanthine to mention a few.
What's relevant here is not only that all are psychoactive to varying degrees but also they are bitter substances that contribute significantly to the taste. For example, dark chocolate is considerably more bitter than milk chocolate because it contains significantly higher level of xanthines than the latter.
I've yet to taste any decaffeinated coffee that in my opinion is worth drinking and it's not for the want of the stimulating effects of the caffeine but rather its taste. Without those xanthines the product just doesn't taste like coffee to me.
From observation, most consumers of decaffeinated coffee consume it with cream or as a latte and often with sugar, these additives tend to mask the bitterness of caffeine so it seems its absence doesn't bother them. For my part I add nothing to coffee—not even sugar—for reason that for me the bitterness of the xanthines is an integral part of the taste.
I drink coffee because of its taste, not for its stimulating properties. Unfortunately, unlike many others, caffeine has almost no noticeable stimulating effect on me—I can drink the strongest coffee at bedtime and still easily fall asleep.
† Despite its name theobromine does not contain bromine.
You seem to be in violent agreement with my point, because what I was getting at is that you drink coffee for the taste, and I drink IPAs for the taste.
Even though there's a popular strain of edgy internet bro logic that "no one actually likes X, they only drink/eat/wear/consume it because Y."
