A moderate tragedy struck my small family recently. My wife began having pain on the left side of her mouth. She found a dentist, and got the problematic cavities fixed, but her teeth still hurt. She tried to be patient, and Sensodyne helped, but she still has pain anytime she eats or drinks anything hot or cold and worse: anytime she drinks coffee.
I wouldn't say she's an addict, but my wife is still a coffee aficionado. She drinks it most days both for sharpness and scrumptiousness. The pain is supposed to go away with time, but the prospect of not being able to drink coffee without spending the rest of the day in pain is still quite harrowing in the meantime.
We did some research and learned that the cause of our conundrum is the coffee's acidity. Water has the neutral pH of 7; coffee generally has a fairly acidic pH of around 5. Knowing the cause, I then set out for a solution. Sure most coffee has a low pH, but most coffee has caffeine too, and that doesn't stop us from drinking decaf. If they can take the caffeine out of coffee, surely they can find a way to have less acid too, right?
I did a little searching and found that I was right: they do have low acid coffee. While they don't usually take the acid out a la decaf coffee, apparently growing the coffee beans at lower altitudes makes them less acidic.
The first brand we tried was HealthWise Coffee:
And surprisingly, it was pretty good! It has a bit of an unoffensive aftertaste of some flavor I can't identify, but it tastes otherwise perfectly normal. And best of all, it was painless! My wife can again enjoy coffee.
Admittedly, I bought HealthWise because it was the cheapest low-acid coffee. They seem to make it through some acid-reducing process. So I'm sure other brands will be better for the coffee snobs out there. I've been looking for our next coffee adventure, and we'll likely try some of the following:
My wife is a huge hazelnut fan too, so I'm thinking the Puroast Low Acid Hazelnut Decaf Coffee looks perfect for her. Hopefully someone else can use this knowledge to find something that similarly makes both their teeth and their tongue happy.