I grew up watching family members adding sugar/milk to coffee and was led to believe that was like a default method. Guess so when garbage stale coffee is used it has to be masked with anything to make it more palatable. You will also have those that assume it all tastes the same.
Granted coffee can be an acquired taste, but is mind-blowing at what notes can be brought out from various coffees with roast/extraction techniques. With what I roast I often pick up notes like dark chocolate, molasses, nuts and occasional fruits. All naturally occurring too.
Yeah, I’m convinced that a lot of people who say they “don’t like coffee” (like my sister and my mom, who both dump flavored coffeemate into their Keurig coffee) have just never tasted actual, good, coffee.
Despite my having given them both cups of pourover, I think they just have a mental block against black coffee that they can’t overcome and learn to like it.
When I first started drinking coffee more than 23 years ago, I also put cream & sugar into it. Most often at Starbucks I’d put 2 “sugar in the raw” and half & half.
But then I recognized that some people drank their coffee black, and I thought to myself that there must be something to it, plus, I also realized that the cream & sugar I was adding to the coffee didn’t do me any favors, health-wise, so I made up my mind to learn to enjoy coffee black.
And I never looked back.
I eventually moved on from Starbucks to light roasted coffee which actually allows one to experience the sometimes unique flavors of the varietal and the terroir.
So I guess I’ve always just been a curious enough person that, when I hear that people enjoy a certain food or drink that might not, at first, sound good, I think to myself that there “must be something to it”.
I guess some people (like mom & sis) just can’t overcome that mental block and they’ll just always suffer through bad coffee, holding their noses and dumping in massive quantities of flavoring, just to use it as a caffeine delivery method.
I say, at that point, you may as well just buy NoDoz pills. And I do know people who do just that.