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Comment by morley | Hacker News Reader

If you love coffee, the best alternative to coffee is decaf. If you buy directly from a great roaster, you'll hardly be able to tell the difference. I'm not sure I'd be able to in a blind taste test (decaf if anything takes a little less bitter in latte form).

If you have a grinder, you could buy beans from any number of places online, like Blue Bottle. I'm lucky enough to live near a ton of roaster coffee shops that will grind bags for me.

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I considered this, but the options are very limited where I live (Lithuania). We have a few high quality local roasters, but even they have only one blend of decaf (and dozens of normal coffee).

Off topic but I visited Lithuania recently and got acquainted with the šakotis. Now I'm back in Estonia and can't find it anywhere in stores and having withdrawal symptoms :D It was so good.

I'm curious as to why you have the roasters grind the beans for you. Quality of ground coffee deteriorates much faster than whole beans. It depends on the grind size, but I'm pretty sure it's hours compared to weeks. A manual grinder like the Hario Skerton only costs $40 which is about the cost of a month of coffee beans for people who drink a cup or 2 every day.

I'm fairly lazy so rather than make one or two cups of coffee a day, I prefer to make a one-week batch of cold brew at a time. (It's also a pain to manually grind that much coffee at once.) Cold brew is a lot more forgiving about "grind freshness."

I'm considering buying a grinder, but it'll probably be $100-200, and I'm not sure if that's worth the price when the coffee shop will do it for me.

Oh, if it's for cold brew than that's completely fine. Definitely not worth the price if that's all you're doing, but a grinder does give you the flexibility to make other types of coffee.

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