Caffeine is not a drink
It’s a drug.
Here’s how it became the most widely used drug on earth, and why we made something different.
Our ancestors didn’t need 3 espresso shots to get out of bed
They woke with the sun, and they cold plunged before it was cool
Their diet?
Even cleaner than the Erewhon hot bar.
Their biology didn’t fight Mother Nature, it was shaped by her.
And humans got along fine for thousands of years until some leaves changed everything.
Story has it that Emperor Shen Nong was boiling water, a cutting-edge practice, and some leaves blew into the pot
Voila, tea: The first caffeinated beverage.
The Chinese revered tea as a tonic for mind and body.
The Japanese Zen Monks later used it to support long hours of meditation.
Coffee was later discovered in Ethiopia when a goat herder named Kaldi saw his goats going wild after eating some berries and decided to try them himself.
When caffeinated beverages made their way to Europe, cafes became gathering places to discuss math and science and whether or not the Earth was flat.
When caffeine found the US, it fueled the industrial revolution.
Commerce was booming.
Cities were sprawling.
But machines could only do so much.
The real leverage was one thing: Human labor.
For business tycoons, the formula was simple: the more hours your workers worked, the more money you made.
Caffeine worked.
So well that they mandated breaks to drink more of it.
So yeah, we pretty much built the modern world high on caffeine.
It was no longer consumed in small doses for conversation and enlightenment.
It went from a tool humans used — into a drug that used humans as tools.
So today, caffeine is everywhere.
It’s the only drug that can be used in prescription pills in a carefully managed dose but when it’s disguised as food, drinks, candy or even hot dogs — there’s no rules, leading to overconsumption, cortisol spikes, anxiety, gut issues…
And it can stay in our systems well past bedtime.
So we end up offsetting a shitty night of sleep with the very thing that causes another shitty night of sleep.
This isn’t about demonizing caffeine, it’s about rethinking our relationship to it.
Because work has changed since the days of assembling the model T.
Productivity is not longer measured by just the quantity of hours worked, it’s measured by the quality of ideas we bring to work.
MUD\WTR is an organic drink designed with low doses of caffeine and high doses of USA-grown functional mushrooms.
A drink that supports energy, focus, immunity, and gut health.
A drink that uses caffeine as a tool, not the other way around.
Because the world doesn’t need more anxiety.
It needs more of your presence and ideas.
Try it.
You’ll see what we mean.