Cereal coffee
coffee substitute
A cereal coffee (also known as grain coffee, roasted grain drink or roasted grain beverage) is a hot drink made from one or more cereal grains roasted and commercially processed into crystal or powder form to be reconstituted later in hot water. The product is often marketed as a caffeine-free alternative to coffee and tea, or in other cases where those drinks are scarce or expensive.
Several well-known cereal coffee brands are Nestlé Caro, Postum, and Inka. Other brands can be found at health food stores and at some grocery stores. Some common ingredients include toasted barley, malted barley, rye, chicory, molasses, brown rice, chickpeas, sorghum, and beet root.
Use
Poland
Grain coffee came to Poland from Prussia (at the end of the 18th century), but since then little has changed in the production of this drink. Just like in the past, it is made from roasted rye grains, wheat (including spelt from organic farming) or barley, and sometimes also from dandelion root, sugar beet, or chicory. In some regions, coffee substitutes are prepared from fenugreek or lupine seeds. Less popular additions are figs or acorns. The first grain coffee factory in Poland was established on the initiative of Ferdynand Bohm in 1818 in Włocławek.
“Cereal coffee” enters the record as coffee substitute. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Cereal, coffee and substitute can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 7, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3243039. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1818.
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This entry incorporates text from “Cereal coffee” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.