My grandfather's Maxwell House hack was a pinch of salt and eggshells. Give it a go. It makes a difference. He called it 'Hotel Coffee'.
Question about the eggshells, did he roast them first or something? Cause I'll totally give that a shot. I've tried cinnamon and didn't like it, black pepper and kind of liked it (seriously, try it). What I did find today, that I loved, was eating a banana with my coffee. The two flavors mixed together really well.
Worked with a girl who added salt to the coffee "because that's what her dad did, he learned it in the navy." Salt in coffee is fucking disgusting. It's not that it brings "2/5" coffee to "3/5" it's that people who try this trick do not understand that the scale goes to 10 not 5 and holy shit, putting salt in it throws it off the scale entirely and puts it somewhere in that weird land where consomme and chicory lives.
Trader Joe's used to sell a christmas blend that was coffee, cloves, cinnamon, allspice and black pepper. It was fucking delicious. then they switched to ground, which allowed them to cut it with robusta, and now it tastes like Goodyear All Season radials.
Amen. Once you switch a percentage to Robusta, you're fucked...Trader Joe's coffee quality has gone way downhill in the past year-ish (for their blends, single origin stuff is still pretty good).
I've only had chicory once, at an otherwise decent diner in Oklahoma City. I thought that someone pissed in my coffee or something. I was about to send it back when the Texan whom my buddy was dating chimed in with, "It's just chicory; it's good." Later that day, this girl would give an Uber driver 3 stars for being Mexican (she just "didn't like something about him"), just so we're clear about the type of person.
He just threw them in after cracking them for scrambled eggs or pancakes. Mind you, his salt-use jives with kleinbl00's coworker's salt-use origin. Gramps was a cook in the Coast Guard. He didn't add the salt to the coffee itself, but to the grounds. I'm not saying that you are going to have a great cup of coffee. But, it takes the edge off Maxwell House.