Black Coffee vs. a Tin of Mushroom Powder

I drink black coffee. No milk, no sugar, no cold brew, no oat lattes. Hot, fast, done. I've been doing this for as long as I can remember and I have never once felt the need to revisit it.

My wife is the opposite. She rotates through matcha, strawberry matcha, flavored lattes, and whatever the new thing is. She's curious about it all. I am not.

So when she handed me a tin of MUD\WTR and asked me to try it, I had the specific kind of skepticism you can only have about a habit you've never questioned.

I should say upfront: I love drinking coffee, but I am not a connoisseur. I cannot tell you anything about single-origin beans. I don't own a pour-over. I have an espresso machine because it is one button, and one button is the maximum amount of complexity I'm willing to tolerate before the kids are awake. My mornings are not meditative. They are a kitchen, a countdown, and a small person asking where her shoes are.

When I mentioned this to Shane Heath, the founder of MUD\WTR, he didn't push back on it. His own mornings, he told me, used to be the opposite of mine — meditation, a walk, movement, all before 8am — and then his son was born and that all fell apart for a while. He's since rebuilt something: journaling, a tea ceremony, the gym, back at his desk by 8:30. But the point, he said, isn't the sequence. "I'm not trying to engineer my morning so much as create the conditions where I'm open and receptive to ideas and creativity."

That landed. My morning isn't engineered either. It's a defense system.

MUD\WTR, for those unfamiliar, is a powder. Mushrooms, cacao, masala chai, some other things I didn't read closely. You add hot water and milk. It has caffeine, but not much. The whole proposition is that it's a coffee alternative for people who want to feel something slightly different in the morning.

I had three honest objections going in. The process — I was not blowing up my routine for a powder. Matcha — I tried it once, it didn't sit right, and I'd written off the entire adjacent category on the spot. And milk — I don't drink it.

I tried it anyway, on a Monday, while the toaster was going and someone was crying about a sock.

It was good. Not in the way you have to talk yourself into. Just actually good — earthy, a little sweet, warm. I'd braced for the process to be the dealbreaker and it turned out to be nothing: powder, water, stir, done. Faster than I'd convinced myself it would be.

I've restocked since. I didn't have to. I have coffee. I bought it again anyway, which is the most honest review I can give.

Here's the part I keep coming back to, though.

I don't know how much of what I felt was the drink and how much was the simple fact of doing something new. I felt more awake on MUD\WTR mornings. Maybe that's the caffeine. Maybe it's the mushrooms. Or maybe it's something else entirely.

When I asked Shane about this, he made a point that genuinely changed how I think about my coffee. "Most people have no idea how much they're drinking, and even less know that their body's ability to process it is written into their genes," he said. "Depending on your version of the CYP1a2 gene, you could be clearing caffeine in 5 hours or still feeling it 15 hours later. A lot of people think they're just anxious people, but they're really just over-caffeinating." He calls caffeine a fatigue-signal blocker rather than fuel. "The dose makes the poison, and with caffeine, most people have no idea what their actual dose is or whether their body can even handle it."

I have no idea what my actual dose is. I've never thought about it. I've been pouring it into a cup for a decade and trusting the result.

On the mushroom side, I asked him what's real and what's hype. He didn't oversell. Lion's Mane and Cordyceps, he said, are the two you'll actually feel — Lion's Mane for cognitive function, Cordyceps for VO2max if you're not already trained. The others (Reishi, Chaga) do things you won't perceive in real time. "They're real, the science is becoming legitimate, but they're not a replacement for sleep, stress management, or eating well."

That tracked with the experience. I didn't feel transformed. I felt slightly more present, and I'm not sure whether that was the Lion's Mane or the fact that for the first time in years I had to pay attention to what I was making. My hands didn't know the motion yet. My brain, which had been running mornings on autopilot for a decade, got a small jolt from novelty alone.

I started noticing my coffee more, too. Going back and forth made me taste both things in a way I hadn't bothered to in years.

I'm not switching. I'm not converted. But the thing my wife was actually offering me, I think, wasn't a product. It was the reminder that a ritual you stop noticing isn't really a ritual anymore. It's just something happening to you while you check your phone.

That's worth more than any ingredient list.

If you're a black coffee person who has no interest in being converted: that's fine. Stay. But try it one morning. Not to replace anything. Just to make sure your ritual is still yours.