It’s definitely an acquired taste, I assume that if you get hooked on it, you start to associate the taste with getting stimulated which makes it seem pleasant.
Having said that, I don’t drink coffee (tastes awful unless it’s drowned in milk and sugar at which point what’s the point), but the smell is heavenly, and I like coffee flavour in cakes/desserts.
And I say this having tasted some of the best espresso known to man - my closest friend is obsessed and has equipment worth thousands, and we’ve sampled great coffee places including in Italy.
I’ve tried drinking it many times. In fact I used to drink it a bit when I was a teen, but the taste was “meh” to me and I was getting stomach cramps when I drank it. So I stopped. And over the years since then the smell has just got more and more skunky and unpleasant to me.
I don’t even like coffee flavored chocolates or foods because of my dislike for the taste of coffee. I put up with the smell of the drink for my wife’s sake (because she loves coffee). But sometimes it gets so over-powering to me that I just quietly go to another room.
I really think it’s something in my active genes that causes my dislike of coffee. Like my body thinks it’s poisonous or something.
