This Is the Strongest Cup of Coffee in the World
As someone who is constantly at least a little bit tired, I’m a big fan of caffeine. I haven’t looked into whether it’s caused by some sort of anemia or just the exhausting deluge of modern existence, because my insurance doesn’t support that. Which, ironically enough, is another source of stress. What is a much more reasonable solution to me is to constantly barrage my brain with caffeine in order to get anything done and to ensure I spend at least a portion of my day wearing actual pants.
If you’re a fellow caffeine enjoyer, you’ve probably looked into ways to up your intake. Obviously, you could go full Honore de Balzac with it and tank 50 cups a day straight to the dome, but that’s not affordable or convenient and is going to end up with you pissing so much your toilet bowl will be left with the thickness of an eggshell. So instead, you look to increasing caffeine by volume. You’d probably go first to the classic: espresso, a concentrated shot brewed via pressure.
The thing is, though, that, contrary to popular opinion, a single shot of espresso contains less caffeine than a standard eight-ounce cup of coffee. Espresso comes in around 63 milligrams of caffeine per shot, while brewed coffee is between 80 to 100 milligrams. Even a double shot, which is usually what’s served by coffee shops, isn’t that much stronger in terms of caffeine. The flavor is obviously a lot stronger, which is what can confuse people, the same reason that people think dark roast coffee is stronger than light roast coffee, despite the opposite being true.
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The fact is, if you’re relying on brewing method to up the caffeine level, outside of Frankenstein combos like a red eye (brewed coffee with a shot of espresso in it) or a black eye (the same, with two espresso shots), you’re probably getting roughly around the standard 100 milligrams per serving.
Which is to say, if you really want to get into inadvisably high caffeine content, you have to start with the beans — and Death Wish Coffee. Their major innovation was the use of robusta beans, along with the classic arabica. Robusta beans contain twice the caffeine content, at the cost of (arguably) taste.
So is this high caffeine content a marketing ploy at the cost of taste? In Death Wish's case, maybe a little bit, but I’ve had their coffee and it’s certainly drinkable. They seem to have at least pursued, on some level, a balance. Other companies have taken that mantle and run with it, pursuing caffeine above all else. At the top of this mountain is, funny enough, a roaster called Devil Mountain. Their “Black Label” blend clocks in at 1,036 milligrams of caffeine per eight ounces, or 10 times the normal amount. It’s so much caffeine, in fact, that it’s actually dangerous.
That’s not speculation, either: In recent caffeine news, you might remember the Panera caffeinated lemonade that ended up killing two people. The 46-year-old who died had three large servings of the lemonade at 390 milligrams a pop, coming out to 1,170 milligrams of caffeine total, which you’d hit at between 11 and 12 ounces of Devil Mountain’s blend.
In short then, if you’re searching for the world’s strongest cup of coffee, they’re your solution, one that I would in no way medically recommend. You’ll have to find another way to cure your narcolepsy.
