So I am self-taught and green on handling requests, but it seems to me that in the case of no request body, the BufferedReader should output null if I call .readLine() again after running this kind of while loop:

while (!(line = br.readLine()).isBlank()){ some code here }

So I have done this to successfully load up method and headers into variables, and everything is working swell until I decided to add a bit of code to detect (not yet handle) the presence of a request body

try {
    if ((body = br.readLine()) == null) {
        System.out.println("body = " + body);
        reqLog.append("- Request body: falsen");
    } else {
        reqLog.append("- Request body: truen");
    }
} catch (IOException e){
    e.printStackTrace();
}

The code above blocks my thread – my web browser patiently waits while nothing visually happens on my server. Everything within this block executes however when I cancel the browser connection. Even the System.out.println(body = null) then pops up in the terminal, before the error for an aborted connection takes over.
Removing the try-block above solves everything.

I am super grateful for a pointer toward proper detection of a request body as well!