Sold under often annoying brand names like Ryze, Four Sigmatic, and MUD/WTR, mushroom coffees are blends of dry coffee, tea, mushrooms, and other ingredients that are added to hot water to make a not-quite-coffee slurry that some people enjoy. Proportions and ingredients differ from product to product, but, at the risk of over-generalizing, I’m going to say that the mushroom coffees that provide the most morning energy are the ones that contain the most caffeine. I guess dried mushroom dust could provide some health benefits, but if it does, there’s not a lot of hard science to back it up.
Lifehacker’s senior health editor Beth Skwarecki gave a caffeine-free version of MUD/WTR a try and described it as “the most foul-tasting thing,” but added, “If we lived in an alternate universe where this is what coffee tasted like, I’d deal. But to have to put up with that and get only 35 milligrams of caffeine? Unacceptable.”
Bottom line: Some kinds of mushroom coffees are basically coffee. Others do not work.