I seldom drink coffee. It gives me heartburn. At least it USED TO give me heartburn until I learned the fix. The fix for heartburn relief for coffee? Yep, the fix for me, anyway. When I worked in law offices in my 20’s and 30’s, I drank up to 7-8 cups of coffee a day. When I went to work for myself and had to be the one to make coffee, I stopped drinking it. I didn’t miss it. It was no longer part of my daily routine. I went a couple of years without it. Then one day I woke up craving it. I had a cup and it gave me heartburn. Bad heartburn. I figured I could no longer drink it.
CUT TO 10 YEARS LATER and I read where adding baking soda to the coffee grounds as you brew them will help neutralize acid. A chick on Youtube even showed me using a ph test strip. Compelling. It did lessen the heartburn but I’d still have it. I mentioned to a friend I was using nonfat dry milk in my coffee and sometimes almond or soy milk. She told me she’d heard that nonfat and lowfat milk, and rice or nut milks were not as good as full fat dairy in stopping the heartburn. I tried it and, combined with adding baking soda to the coffee grounds, that was my fix. It made sense, since when I’d have coffee in a restaurant and use one of their half and half creamers, I had no heartburn, even with full caffeine coffee.
So what I discovered works for me is adding a pinch of baking soda to the coffee grounds before I brew them. Add a full fat dairy creamer to the coffee.
IMPORTANT: My experience may not be your experience. You have to factor in your own variables for diet, alcohol and meds, stress, sleep, etc. In my life, I seldom took prescription or over the counter medication and when I did, it was for a short period of time. My dad took Tylenol with codeine for back pain for decades, in addition to drinking alcohol. The combination weakened his digestive system so he had terrible heartburn and didn’t drink coffee because of it. So when I began hav ing heartburn due to coffee, I had no other risk factors in my past. I didn’t drink, I didn’t take meds, very little sugar intake, nothing to break down and weaken my stomach lining over the years. Nothing to compromise my immune system. But that’s what worked for me.
A lot of coffee and cigarettes used to give me the jitters, but I don’t get heartburn now with no tobacco and more coffee, but we use baking soda for just about everything including in our toothpaste, cleaning floors, and maybe it would somehow improve our coffee, which is already very gtood, due partly to our hundred foot well and mineral rich water. I always liked the coffee from our well water at the “Old Same Place” in the seventies: it tasted strongly of sulphur, which is acid of course, and worked for me in the coffee and was not all that pleasant straight out of the tap. Our stomachs are naturally acid of course, and produce acid to function, but everybody has got to make their own adjustments, as you point out.