… Can you make good coffee better? The better is the enemy of the good – that’s what my creative director taught me back in the day. So, I gave functional coffee a try. Maybe there’s something to this health trend from the USA. It would be convenient if you could do something directly for your immune system, digestion, or wrinkle-free skin with your morning coffee.
foto: gül işık von pexels
… Can you make good coffee better? The better is the enemy of the good – that’s what my creative director taught me back in the day. So, I gave functional coffee a try. Maybe there’s something to this health trend from the USA. It would be convenient if you could do something directly for your immune system, digestion, or wrinkle-free skin with your morning coffee.
foto: gül işık von pexels
But let’s start at the beginning: What is good coffee? For us here at Mount Hagen, it’s always organic or Demeter coffee. Because this is the only way to preserve the environment, nature, and biodiversity. It is always fair-trade coffee. Because only then do the farmers really have a livelihood. It is always hand-picked cherries and beans that are roasted very gently and slowly in drum roasters here in Hamburg, Germany. This is the only way to fully develop the more than 800 aromas and bring out the character of our unusual Arabicas. Definitely not a mainstream pleasure – “coffee for connoisseurs”. So far. So good.
Back to my self-experiment with functional coffee. I had read that in the USA, coffee is enriched with turmeric, ginseng, cinnamon, thiamine, coenzyme Q10, mushrooms, and other things to give it a healthy added value (#function). Hmm.
Coffee is actually quite healthy per se: 3-4 cups a day reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease, strokes, liver cancer, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and diabetes (read here: “How healthy is coffee?”).
But now, as a functional coffee, it is also said to strengthen the immune system, stimulate digestion and – attention! – counteract premature wrinkles. And there they had me.
“Anti-wrinkle” is a magic word that magically attracts me. Always! (Please don’t ask me why.) And that’s why I had to have coffee with collagen, the so-called “glow coffee” among functional coffees. Although the coffee powder itself is not enriched, the collagen powder is stirred into the brewed coffee and the secret ingredient of all anti-ageing creams is applied from the inside. The aim is to make the skin firm and elastic and give you a healthy glow, hence the “glow”.
“And?”, the best of all my colleagues asked me after four weeks, “Can you see anything yet?”. The question alone shows: The success was rather moderate. Yes, I know you’re supposed to drink functional coffees regularly over several months. But what can I say: my coffee definitely tastes better without glow powder. I drink it because I like its flavors and find it delicious – which it definitely isn’t with the powder. That’s why I can’t imagine additives like galangal, mushrooms, or turmeric in my cup. I prefer to cook with them. And when I read that they put “fine bitter dandelion extracts and artichoke juice concentrate” in the coffee and actually charge over 88$ per pound for it… (amazing, what a business model). I’m out.
If I really think that the chocolate flavors of my favorite Peruvian espresso could use a little cardamom because I’m in the mood for the Orient, okay. But otherwise, coffee “works” for me on its own.
How about you? Have you already tried functional coffees? How did they taste and what do you think of them? Or are you also more of a pleasure purist? Let us know in the comments how your self-experiments turned out.
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