Mushroom Coffee Is The Weird Wellness Brew That Works

When I first heard about mushroom coffee a couple of years ago, my brain did what every normal caffeine-dependent city dweller’s would: assume this was some new-age experiment best left to LA wellness retreats and YouTube nutritionists with suspicious skin glows. Coffee and mushrooms?

Together? It sounded like a psychedelic mistake. Like someone accidentally dropped a portobello into their French press and decided to run with it.

Pinterest

But curiosity, and Instagram, got the better of me. Recently, I took the plunge and ordered a pricey bag of mushroom coffee from Amazon that promised sharper focus, reduced jitters, and a "gentle uplift"—whatever that meant. I was prepared to hate it. And guess what, I was wrong. But I was also... kind of right.

Firstly, What Is Mushroom Coffee?

Obviosuly, mushroom coffee isn’t a bubbling broth made of shiitake or button mushrooms that you'd gladly slurp on if it were a Ramen bowl, so let’s get that out of the way. It’s regular ground coffee—usually arabica or robusta—blended with adaptogenic mushrooms like lion’s mane, chaga, cordyceps, or reishi.

These fungi aren’t the ones you toss on your pizza or fry with garlic. They’re medicinal mushrooms, used in Eastern medicine for centuries and now rebranded into sleek sachets and wellness buzzwords.

The focus is on getting that familiar caffeine kick of your morning brew, but balanced with the supposedly brain-boosting, immune-strengthening, stress-reducing properties of these fungi.

Pinterest

How Does it Taste?

Nothing like the Pizza toppings on your leftover pizza, for sure. Moreover, any coffee purist will tell you nothing beats a good single-origin espresso or a no-nonsense cappuccino. Mushroom coffee, in comparison, tastes... earthy. That’s the nicest way to put it.

Depending on the blend, there’s a slightly nutty, herbal undertone—some say it’s like drinking coffee in a forest, others say it's what they imagine Hogwarts detention would taste like. But mix it with oat milk or throw it into a smoothie and it becomes surprisingly pleasant. Magic of shrooms I guess.

The key is in managing expectations: you’re not drinking it for the taste, you’re drinking it for the experience. And the claimed benefits.

Why Are People Drinking This?

Many reasons, one of them being the need to cut down on caffeine intake. Mushroom coffee has emerged as a gentler alternative to regular coffee. It’s marketed as being easier on the gut, kinder to cortisol levels, and smarter on focus—especially lion’s mane, which is often described as "nootropic" (read: good for your brain).

Pinterest

Cordyceps is pitched as a performance enhancer for athletes, reishi for calm and better sleep, and chaga for immunity. Whether those claims are fully backed by science is still a bit fuzzy, but there’s enough anecdotal gold to keep the trend alive.

If you love a black coffee, you might find the taste of the mushroom coffee almost herbal in its undertone and not unpleasant...just different.

So, while it is not the best-tasting coffee you'll ever have, and one of the weirdest, there is a chance you'll either end up hating it entirely or grow a taste for it like you have for your spirits.