YEGE Mushroom Coffee

Just PARTLY coffee, which is enough, I think. I’m not kidding myself or anyone else. We’re all trying to figure out how to improve our general state of health and well-being, maybe noticing the cost of coffee has DOUBLED under this past 4 years’ economic policies and we know mushrooms can be grown en masse, underground, in the dark, in old limestone or coal mines or other large caverns which don’t require taking up megahectares of arable land and/or destroying valuable complex ecologies of rain forest, islands or mountain landscapes with coffee bean tree/shrubbery. We can use that space for golf courses and hotel/resorts, of course (WARNING: the preceding comment NOT intended for the satirically challenged nor irony deficient). But, back to this “brew.” You know that inCREDIBLE olfactory “bloom” you get when you stick your nose and part of your face into the opening of a bag of freshly ground dark roasted coffee beans? Yeah, no, you don’t get that with this. What I sense more than anything is an overwhelming scent of moldy coconut meat. Not like aspergillus mold on that loaf of bread you forgot about in your pantry last month, or the stuff on your weeks-old Chinese take-out, but rich, loamy, compost-heap meadow mushroom scent which, if you’re a mycophile (like me) is heartily welcomed, a very good quality scent but overwhelmed by the STRONG odor of coconut. It’s just too much; someone should monkey around with the proportions, I think. If I wanted coconut coffee I could just brew instant coffee with coconut water. As a cuppa brew, it has its upsides though, even black it’s palatable, smooth, and at the recommended “dosage” about as strong a blend as any generic instant coffee but made with arabica, not run-of-the mill (ahem…) mass-marketed Colombian robusta beans. I’m still doing comparisons between this and two other brands at the same price point, one of them Colombian bean-sourced (which I hadn’t paid enough attention to when purchasing or I wouldn’t have - I generally don’t care for Caribbean, central-south American coffee having a strong preference for east African or Indonesian varieties) but this ranks best out of the three. As you’ll notice, there’s a plethora of these being marketed all of a sudden and for the most part they all seem to be rated at or around 4.3 or 4.4 on the Amazon consumer scale. My general rule is, if a combination of 4’s and 5’s doesn’t go over 90%, I won’t buy; I don’t buy at all if over 10% give a 1 or wish there were a ZERO rating. Of course, this works for me. I have a cup of “real” coffee around 5AM (I own dogs… or maybe it’s the other way around), then a cup of mushroom brew with breakfast maybe an hour later, typically two cups of coffee a day before 7 AM, rarely I’ll have one around noon. The amount of caffeine in this brew is adequate; strong enough that I had a late cup yesterday afternoon - around 2 PM - and I was up reading the same paragraph and Kindle page just on the edge of almost asleep and barely conscious but not quite ready to turn out the light, you know? Until 1AM, about 2 hours later than normal for me. I find that, having started this experiment a week ago, I’m slightly better at tasks requiring sustained attention, focus, energy or maybe it’s that 2 months into winter, the hysteresis of spring emerging is starting to affect my circadian rhythms. I think it’s the ‘shrooms. Overall value? While I had second thoughts yesterday, now I’m glad I bought a second bag at the half-price (ish) sale. YMMV. ***************** edit. 05MAR2025 I’ve got a lovely bag of coconut dust… Drinking this out of spite. I paid for it, it’s got caffeine in it. I have four brands, four bags (well, one plastic screw-top container among them) of instant “mushroom” coffee and out of the four, the one that stands out as a clearly as a VW Bug among a parking lot full of Lamborghinis is this one. IF you like coconut flavor, coconut scent, coconut water, smelling, tasting, thinking about, saying the word coconut, this brand’s for you. I prefer coffee with my mushrooms, not coffee in my coconut… I like coconut, just not in coffee. Maybe my 30 year old son will take it home with him… downrated to 3 stars.