The first coffee is a ritual. The second is a pleasure. The third just sort of happens. Somewhere between the morning espresso and the afternoon 'shall we have another?' coffee stops being an event and becomes the punctuation of the day.
In Serbia, we never needed a specialty coffee movement for that. Coffee has long been the way of saying "stay a little longer" — a reason to sit down, a business meeting, a break, gossip, a reconciliation, and a perfectly legitimate excuse to do nothing for half an hour. Specialty culture has simply added one more possibility: that the coffee, alongside all of that, is actually good.
Then wellness arrived and, predictably, attempted to optimise it too. Today you can find highly precise guidance on when to drink your first coffee: not immediately after waking, wait 60 minutes, or 90, watch your cortisol, get some daylight first. The internet is particularly fond of rules that come with a number, because a number gives the impression that the argument is settled.
The science is, as always, less tidy. There is no particularly compelling reason for a healthy person who enjoys their morning coffee to start timing it with a stopwatch the moment they get up. A far more interesting question lies at the other end of the day — not when to drink the first, but when to drink the last.
That is where the evidence becomes more concrete. A systematic review and meta-analysis of 24 studies published in 2023 found that caffeine on average reduces total sleep time, decreases sleep efficiency, extends the time taken to fall asleep, and reduces time spent in deep sleep. The authors estimated that coffee containing around 107 mg of caffeine — if you want to avoid a measurable shortening of sleep — should ideally be consumed almost nine hours before going to bed.
If you usually fall asleep around midnight, you have just looked at your three o'clock coffee with a degree of suspicion.
Nine hours is not, however, a curfew on espresso. Dose matters, as does individual sensitivity, habituation and the rate at which your body metabolises caffeine. A more recent controlled study underlines how much context shapes the outcome: 100 mg of caffeine showed no significant effect on sleep when taken four hours before bed in that small group of participants, while a large dose of 400 mg disrupted sleep even when taken much earlier. In other words, "caffeine" is not one and the same situation whether you are talking about a small espresso or a large supplement dose.
The more useful approach, then, is a small personal experiment rather than the adoption of another prohibition. If you find it hard to fall asleep, wake during the night, or feel in the morning as though sleep did not complete its work, move your last coffee a few hours earlier for a week or two. You do not need a ring that measures your sleep stages or an app that convinces you that you slept badly before you have had the chance to notice for yourself. It is enough to see whether anything changes.
You may discover that the problem was never coffee. It was coffee at five.
That is awkward precisely because coffee at five rarely exists for the caffeine alone. It is the pause after work, the continuation of lunch, a meeting that ran long, or a reason to see someone you have not seen in weeks. In a culture where "let's get a coffee" often has little to do with the drink itself, the advice to simply stop drinking coffee after two sounds rather like the advice to stop seeing people after two.
Fortunately, ritual and caffeine are not the same thing. A good decaf no longer has to be punishment for people who have used up their daily allowance of enjoyment. If the bean is good, the roasting careful and the preparation serious, coffee without most of its caffeine can be coffee you choose for the flavour — not because a doctor has confiscated the original.
At VERA we treat decaf as a normal coffee, not as a footnote on the menu. The idea that an afternoon cup must keep you awake to qualify as "real" coffee is slightly strange when you think about it. Sometimes you want the taste, a warm cup and another twenty minutes of conversation — not an additional shift of alertness.
The same applies to matcha, with one important note: matcha also contains caffeine. The feeling may be different, and the composition of the drink is different, but your body does not cancel out caffeine simply because the drink is green. That is worth discussing separately, because the internet has gone from "matcha and coffee are not the same thing" to the much larger claim that one delivers some perfectly calm energy while the other inevitably causes chaos.
There is one more thing neither of these drinks can do. They cannot replace sleep. Caffeine can reduce the subjective sensation of drowsiness — which is precisely why it is so useful — but wakefulness and rest are not synonyms. If we sleep too little, we solve the next day's fatigue with more coffee, and then because of that fatigue we drink it later and later: a small self-sustaining system, easy to build.
We sleep too little to drink less coffee, and we drink late enough to sleep badly again. That is a fairly sophisticated problem for a drink that was only supposed to make our mornings better.
Perhaps that is why the most useful piece of advice about coffee is not sophisticated at all. Drink it because you enjoy it, pay attention to how it affects you, and do not turn someone else's optimal schedule into your own law. If your sleep is not good, the last coffee of the day is one of the first things worth examining.
And make it a good one. If a third coffee is going to exist, it would be a shame for it to be a poor one.
Try it at VERA — specialty café and wellness bistro, Nikole Spasića 4, Stari Grad, Belgrade.
Specialty coffee at VERA →