FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Food

This Startup Wants to Put Medicinal Mushrooms in Your Coffee

Finnish startup Four Stigmatic says its new beverage delivers all of the benefits of coffee without the caffeine crash or stomach acid burn.
Foto via Four Stigmatic.

Remember when buying a cappuccino with extra froth was about as exotic as your coffee order got? Not any more. Now budding baristas are infusing their brews with everything from butter to Viagra.

And coffee is only getting weirder.

The latest invention to "disrupt" the coffee world comes from Finnish startup Four Stigmatic, who have just released an instant coffee made with medicinal mushrooms.

READ MORE: Bulletproof Coffee Is Not for the Faint of Heart

Advertisement

By infusing a coffee mix with "medicinal" shrooms (no, not that kind) like chaga mushrooms and lion's mane mushrooms, Four Stigmatic says it is able to offset any of the adverse effects of caffeine—including crashes and stomach acid burn. What's more, it claims that their powdered mushroom-spiked sachets taste just like a smooth long black.

MUNCHIES reached out to Tero Isokauppila, founder of Four Stigmatic, for more information on the miraculous-sounding coffee. He told us: "The high amounts of minerals in chaga mushrooms can help make the coffee less acidic. Mushrooms like lion's mane on the other hand offer very interesting potential brain-related benefits. Mushrooms are among the most studied foods in the world and all of these mushrooms have plenty of research on them."

Isokauppila, whose company also sells mushroom hot cacao and mushroom elixirs (who knows?), went on to explain that the mushrooms' medicinal properties are obtained through "a state-of-the-art process called dual-extraction." Again, who knows?

READ MORE: This Man Believes Mushrooms Can Solve Virtually All of Humanity's Problems

But Four Stigmatic's fungi coffees probably aren't all they're cracked up to be. Writing about the drinks trend, nutritionist Cynthia Sass warned that consuming mushrooms can have unwanted consequences. She wrote: "It's important to know that anything medicinal, even plants and natural substances, can have potential side effects and interactions. It's important to note that chagas have a blood thinning effect, so they shouldn't be consumed before any surgery."

Maybe just have your usual flat white and deal with that caffeine crash later.