It sounds like an either/or type of question, but it's not intended as such. When I ask whether you drink flavored coffees or used flavored coffee creamers, what I'm really asking is if you do, which do you prefer? Personally, I prefer drinking coffee without any creamer whatsoever, but that's just me.
Flavored Coffee
While you can find major brands of coffee who sell flavored coffee as well as the unflavored kind, it usually makes more sense to buy flavored coffee that's a specialty of a particular company.
Now, someone needs to throw me a bone here. Back in the early 1980s, I used to drink an instant flavored coffee (so to speak) called Cafe Viennese, but it wasn't produced by General Foods. It came in the same kind of tin, but that's the only similarity. For the life of me, I can't remember the brand name and I can't find it by searching on Google. It was really only a flavored coffee in the sense that it had chocolate added to it.
Despite the fact that flavored coffees exist, most people prefer to use non-dairy flavored coffee creamers.
Flavored Coffee Creamers
Do dairy flavored coffee creamers exist? I've seem hundreds of non-dairy flavored coffee creamers, but I don't think I've seen a flavored coffee creamer with real milk or cream.
Some of the liquid coffee creamers come in specialty containers and some of them come in what looks like milk cartons. These types of non-dairy coffee creamers are probably the easiest to use. There are flavored coffee creamers in powdered form, like Coffee-mate's Hazelnut coffee creamer, but I don't think they're nearly as popular. There's something about pouring liquid into liquid that people seem to prefer.
A Word of Caution
And that word is "trans fat" (that's actually two words but who cares?). One of the things you'll see on some containers of flavored coffee creamers, as well as the unflavored kind, is the notation of "no trans fats" or "0 percent trans fat" or something to that effect.
Don't believe everything you see on a label. The US FDA allows labels to carry a "no trans fat" banner if the trans fat percentage is below a certain threshold. If it's a powdered non-dairy creamer, it's guaranteed to have some percentage of trans fat simply because it's made from partially hydrogenated vegetable oil. There's absolutely no way around that chemical process.
If I'm going to put any kind of coffee creamer in my coffee, I'm going to put a dairy product. At least I know where it came from and I know it has mostly natural ingredients. Of course, that isn't always the case and labels should always be studied before a product is purchased.
Flavored Coffee Creamer Taste
Every once in a while (like once every couple of years), I like to drink flavored coffee. Most of the time, it's just by adding chocolate. I do like the taste of Irish Cream, Hazelnut and Cinnamon, and these three flavors seem to be available everywhere in the US, including convenience stores like Circle K.
Most of the time, I drink my coffee black with two teaspoons of sugar. I can drink it without sugar if I make it weak, but I like my coffee strong. I once spent a month on a US Navy ship where we ran out of everything but coffee. No sugar, no soda and no milk. The only beverages to choose from were unsweetened black coffee and water. That's where I learned to drink weak coffee without sugar or coffee creamer.
My parents always drank plain, black coffee when I was growing up. No creamer and no sugar. In fact all of their siblings drank it the same way. The only thing I can figure out is that they were born and raised before and during the Great Depression of the 1930s and got used to drinking it that way.
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