I’ve received several requests to comment on Bulletproof Coffee. The reason I am being asked is not only have I been an active blogger on nutrition for a few years, but I’m also a coffee enthusiast. I run the site INeedCoffee.com and have been home roasting coffee since 1998. I live in Seattle and have taken espresso vacations to Portland and Vancouver. I’ve been invited to judge at barista competitions and I am the organizer for The Coffee Club of Seattle, which has over 500 members. In 2011 we visited 114 different coffee places. In other words, I like coffee.
Defining Bulletproof Coffee
Upgraded Coffee is the name of the coffee sold at the Bulletproof Exec, which invented the Bulletproof Coffee brewing method. I have not tried the branded Upgraded Coffee, but I have no doubt that it is excellent. I listen to the Upgraded Self podcast and I can tell Dave Asprey sourced a good roaster and importer. This post will not be about the branded Upgraded Coffee. It will be about the Bulletproof Coffee recipe.
To make Bulletproof Coffee you will add MCT oil and unsalted Kerry Gold butter to your brewed “mold free” coffee. This is supposed to taste wonderful and provide all sorts of health benefits. I am aware of the health benefits of doing a fat based Intermittent Fast. In the post Intermittent Fasting – The No Hunger Method, I posted on how I used a strategy outlined in the The Perfect Heath Diet to accomplish the same thing. Instead of butter and MCT oil, I used coconut oil and fermented vegetables. Both his method and my method are feeding the body short chain fats while depriving the body of glucose.
Cognitive Benefit and Taste
I have made Bulletproof style coffee using my home roast a few times now. Did I experience a cognitive boost? Nope. Maybe my body already has enough short chain fats and this style of coffee would be more beneficial to someone deficient. I didn’t notice any increased alertness, like I did with L-Tyrosine. The coffee beans I used were, as Dave suggested, wet processed coffees from Central America, as they are the least likely to get mold. I bought them from Sweet Maria’s Coffee in Oakland, who uses the importer Royal Coffee, which is used by several of the top roasters in the Pacific Northwest and San Francisco. So I will say that the quality of my beans is equal to the best roasters on the West Coast.
As for the taste, I found it to be disappointing, bland and borderline gross. I love the taste of coffee and I love the taste of butter. Mixing the two does not enhance the flavor, it negates it. If you like cream in your coffee then switching to butter might make perfect sense and be a wonderful pleasant tasting experience for you. I personally think it is criminal to acquire the best coffees in the world and then cover up their taste with anything, be that butter, cream, sugar or MCT oil. A better option for me would be to enjoy coffee in all its perfection and then go about consuming short chain fats.
Which source of short chain fats is superior is a topic I’m not interested in investigating. My guess is Kerrygold Butter, MCT Oil and coconut oil are all excellent choices. Just as long as they stay the hell out of my coffee.
Roast Your Own Coffee
Dave has a post on finding the best roasters in your city. It involves looking at Yelp, which in my opinion provides the worthless reviews of 20 year olds with little life experience that bitch about not getting a strong WIFI signal. There is one Seattle roaster that buys lower grade coffee that has a baggy taste with over 100 glowing reviews on Yelp. With enough milk and chocolate any drink can taste good, but that doesn’t speak to quality of the coffee itself.
A better method for locating the highest quality coffee would be to discover who is the most respected in the industry. Visit Coffee Review to find the best coffee roasters in the country. One might be in your town. Another strategy is to find out if there are any regional barista competitions and which cafes and roasters are being represented. Quality talent tends to work for quality coffee businesses. But sadly, most of the country has woefully bad coffee. The only way to guarantee you are getting the highest quality coffee outside of expensive mail order is to roast your own coffee.
There are many ways to roast coffee at home. INeedCoffee has entire section of home roasting coffee tutorials. It is a super easy and very rewarding hobby. And because your buying green coffee, you’ll save a lot of money. Like I said earlier, the beans I buy from Sweet Maria’s are some of the same crops the best roasters on West Coast are bidding for. On the Sweet Maria’s website, you can see the processing method used for each offering. To be Bulletproof compliant source the Wet Processed coffee. Each coffee is cupped by professionals before it is offered for sale. They taste for defects and only buy the best.
Screenshot from Sweet Maria’s website showing you how a coffee was processed.
Better Than Bulletproof Coffee
My coffee journey has turned me into a snob. I make no apologies for that. If I can’t have outstanding coffee, I will drink tea. Putting butter inside my wonderful coffee was a vile experiment that I do not ever wish to repeat. A better strategy is to source the best coffee green, home roast the beans and then consume the coffee black to appreciate the true flavor profile. Once you’ve finished your delicious cup of coffee, consume your short chain fats.
i too experimented with bulletproof coffee and didn’t like it with butter. i do enjoy it with coconut oil. otherwise i drink my coffee black.
i do have one word for all of us to remember though…..mycotoxins.
@Chuck – I have not tried coconut oil in my coffee. “Escape the Herd Coffee”. I’m afraid.
@mas
i can appreciate and actually respect people who prefer black coffee. most people like cream and sugar but find it more acceptable when mixed with this bitter black liquid called coffee.
i actually prefer black myself. i don’t add coconut oil for flavor but for the short chain fats you mention. if it ruined my coffee, i wouldn’t add it. it is something i do for about 1/4 of the coffee i drink. coconut oil is also good slathered on dark chocolate.
@Chuck – Yeah, I understand your point. When I was in Brazil the coffee was awful. So I added cream, which is something I would never do at home. Fortunately, the milk there was excellent so it all worked out.
Use a Bulletproof recipe on a mediocre coffee might have merit.
But for excellent coffee, it is like pouring cola over a 18 year old single malt.
i may just have to do that with the single malt…..i hate scotch. i like bourbon and canadian whiskey, i will drink those on the rocks.
i love a good cup of coffee, especially espresso. i am sure your home brew would be incredible.
Much like with red wine I’m not anywhere near enough of a connoisseur to appreciate coffee the way you do MAS. Meat yes, Coffee no. I’ve enjoyed using butter, coconut oil, a dash of cinnamon, a dash of raw cocoa, and quarter a teaspoon of raw local honey in my morning coffee. I enjoy the creamy, buttery flavour. At first I did notice some cognitive and physical effects. I had fasted most morning until lunch, leangains style, except for black coffee or green tea for the past year or so and operated perfectly great. First few weeks of having a bulletproof coffee first thing in the morning however and it felt like rocket fuel. Now it is far less noticable, though thats potentially due to the feeling becoming the ‘norm.’ I just skip it on training days now and mornings where I don’t feel any smidgen of hunger before I leave home.
@James – Thanks for sharing your experiences. Maybe that is what I am experiencing. Morning fasting gave me one level of cognitive benefit. Maybe adding kimchi and coconut oil brought me more, but I don’t recall noticing at the time. Back then I was more concerned with checking my keto-stix score than determining how sharp my thinking was.
I’m sort of a coffee snob. Always liked it black and bold tasting. Only did I resort to more cream and sugar when I did lots of corporate travelling in the 90s and drank bad hotel coffee.
Nowadays I drink Americanos (espresso shots in hot water) for the really bold taste and love it.
I don’t do butter or cream, tried it…did nothing for me (and diluted the taste).
I do however swear by coconut oil. I found the taste of the espresso was not diminished and it certainly gives a boost in “stable” energy and mental focus.
I find that I am able to easily go longer (2-3pm instead of Noon) till my first meal daily and don’t suffer any signs of excess adrenal stress (anxiety/nervousness/muscle twitching/fatigue) that I had with just coffee/americano.
The potential benefits of MCT based fats is interesting to me for a sustainable low meal frequency lifestyle, while also being active (especially how MCT high diets seem to increase EE vs LCTs).
May also work to help people curb hunger and control eating while eating less often too (which is a realistic factor in maintaining long term weight loss).
Funny part is…I don’t even like the taste of coconut, but hiding in the espresso works for me.
PS. I’m going to trademark it and call it “2 Meal Coffee” because everyone needs a brand to put on t-shirts and hats right?
http://www.theiflife.com/2-meal-coffee/
Oh…the coconut oil (or any fats) with coffee may be a good way for people who are dealing with already stress overload to use an IF based approach. More of a healing approach to IF for a sustainable lifestyle.
@mas – thanks for taking the time to write this!
I’m with you when you say that awesome coffee is best black. I often drink my morning coffee half Bulletproof style and half black for the reason you outline – black coffee (good stuff) is awesome all by itself. Many coffee-haters (the “it’s too bitter without sugar” types) will try Upgraded Coffee (or high quality coffee in general) and be amazed that it tastes good without the sugar.
We know bad (moldy, damaged, or poorly processed) beans contribute to acid and bitter tastes.
The problem is that most people have learned to drink bad coffee so they expect it creamy. Butter and MCT give people something to replace a latte or frappuccino, and it is a convenient breakfast replacement.
Regarding using kimchee in your coffee, that’s downright gross. (ok, kidding, I get it that you must be eating it separately!)
The big question to ask yourself with your kimchee is what species of microbes are present in your ferment. Many fermented veggies are very high in histamine and other biogenic amines, and some species of lacto bacteria actually cause peroxynitrite formation in the gut. We’ve changed the earth’s biome with excessive spraying of several mutagenic fungicides and the microbes have responded by increasing the number of types of toxins they generate, as all microbes do when stressed.
I’m curious if you ever feel a difference when you switch to a new batch of kimchee, or whether you’re controlling the species of ferment you use.
@Mike – I promise to try your coffee method (and Chuck’s) once.
@Dave – I’ve listened to all your shows and was motivated to test my response to removing all fermented foods from my diet and then reintroducing them. I’ve done this test twice now. The results are I feel exactly the same. I also feel fine on restaurant and store bought ferments.
Of course I have no way to know what species is in my kimchi. Oh well. To me it is a very enjoyable hobby that gives me tasty food with no noticeable effects. The only foods that I have a noticeable negative response to are gluten and alcohol, with gluten being the worse. If fermented veggie are negatively impacting my health outcome, that effect is minor and not worth stressing about.
I do give you props for getting the coffee masses off the sugar based coffee drinks. Cheers.
I am so glad you love coffee!! I think it is one of the best foods you can eat and has really gotten a bad name for itself.
Re: Ann – Michael, I think you could do with a ‘Mark As Spam’ button
I don’t do “plain” coffee. Grew up with a single mom who waitressed at a lot of truck stops in the south (texas, oklahoma). When I was old enough to drink coffee it was truck stop coffee (circa 1960′s). My mother drank it black. Me, I had to add sugar and cream (eventually about 8 packets of sugar) in order to cover the bitter taste.
So, I’m a non-connoisseur coffee drinker which means that I’m not seriously into taste testing plain coffee for its flavor. With my morning sluggishness and dazed condition that refuses to go away I’m more about ingesting every single molecule of caffeine I can absorb in order to get moving.
The coffee mold issue was a bit disconcerting so I just ordered a small bag of coffee from BulletProof and will see what it’s like. Given the many years of caffeine use I’m not imagining any major difference in how I feel in the mornings but I’m curious to see if there’s any difference in taste. I seriously need to lose weight but I don’t think there’s any way I’m going to be adding butter to my coffee anytime soon. The MCT maybe. The problem isn’t my appetite in the morning because I don’t really have one. It’s in the evening starting at about 7p.m. and lasting until all hours of the morning. However, if the MCT will still provide an energy boost in the morning I can look for another solution for trying to kill my appetite in the evening.
Good post by the way. After reading all of the endorsements of the bulletproof coffee I’m glad it works for some people. I just don’t think my tastebuds could handle it.
Bill
@Bill – Thanks for the comment. Good luck on your fat loss goals. My weakest times when it comes to excess calories is also the evening. I’l be posting soon on the foods I have found that provide the most satiety.
Just found your Blog and have spent the last hour reading all sorts of stuff I am interested in. I really like your posts on Intermittent Fasting and this post on Bulletproof Coffee. I have been drinking it for a few months now and really like it. I am also from the Seattle area (Des Moines). Can you recommend any roasters in our area for the “mold free” beans? Preferably anyone near the south end where I am located. Thanks for any help!
@Branden – The Burien Press sells Caffe Vita. Caffe Delia in White Center has Velton (morning hours only) and Dubsea Coffee sells Stumptown. All those should be fine.
Glad you like the site.
I agree with this post , I’ll have coconut oil and grass butter on my eggs or meat with a nice cup of coffee flavoured coffee.
@Alex – Well said. Coffee flavored coffee is the best coffee flavor!
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IIRC, Dave Asprey’s Bulletproof Recipe recommends starting slowly with 1 tbsp KerryGold butter and 1 tbsp Coconut Oil, and gradually building up from there to four. I did that, and the ‘oily texture’ that seems to put off some folk did not bother me, as it came on gradually. Started this late July, and have been drinking since. Use stevia to sweeten, and a big scoop of chocolate protein powder adds to the great taste. I’m often doing just 4 tbsp of coconut oil, as the costco is LOT closer to me than the places that carry the KerryGold. I think the oil is increasing morning alertness somewhat. Happier to have dropped 11 pounds since then.
Have also done bulletproof tea with pu-erh. Dave, has anyone found mycotoxins in tea? I particularly wonder about pu-erh, due to the fact that it is fermented. I have usually been using the Numi pu-erh.
Props to Dave A. for introducing me to the recipe–and to coffee, as the effects from the mycotoxins made me hate coffee for years–not anymore! and for turning me on to KerryGold. Have recently had their Aged Cheddar cheese that comes with Jameson’s Irish Whisky blended in and also their Cheddar with Guiness added; *very good stuff*.
Props to Michael for suggesting Sweet Maria’s and green roasting– I soon will be working in Tacoma for the next 6-12 months. I will follow the link re roasting that you posted here, and if it’s not too cumbersome, will try that along with the beans from Sweet Maria’s.
@Roland – When in Tacoma, visit Bluebeard and Metronome on 6th. Both are outstanding.
@Roland Aged tea can have mcyotoxins, yes. Steer clear of aged teas or fermented teas to avoid them, unless you are certain which species fermented it (I’ve never seen that level of control in tea production). A bigger issue with tea is that, while it has amazing antioxidants, it also contains high levels of fluoride. Green and white tea are known to deplete folate levels. I wrote about this in my recent book on nutrition for pregnancy, more at http://www.betterbabybook.com.
I take a green tea extract, and enjoy white tea that is not aged. Surprisingly, you’re by mate and Roy Vos and chamomile go well with butter and MCT. I would encourage you to try MCT instead of coconut oil, because MCT has six times more MCT than coconut oil. The cognitive difference is noticeable for many people.
It is a good idea to steer clear of the cheese with Guiness it it. You will be getting unfiltered fungal toxins from the grain in the beer, as well as traces of gluten and other anti-nutrients.
So glad you like the Bulletproof Coffee recipe – it’s doing some amazing things.
I still can’t get into Michael’s recipe of fermented vegetables blended with coffee. That’s just gross! (kidding Michael – I know you don’t blend them!)
Michael you inspired me to test another batch of homemade sauerkraut. I chose fresh, locally grown, biodynamic green cabbage. For the ferments, I added a human bacterial probiotic source in 1970 from a woman who had never had antibiotics in her life, and kept genetically pure ever since, and the right amount of salt. When the ferment was complete, I tried it. Predictably, the histamine levels that come from fermenting vegetables, even low-protein ones like cabbage, caused the problems they usually do, namely a histamine response (allergies) like swelling, etc. This is a major issue for a significant number of people. They never know when they are consuming histamine, but they know that they are not as well as they would like to be.
Biogenic amines in fermented foods deserves recognition as a significant hazard for people who already have allergies, which sadly is most of us. Most coffee, even washed coffee, forms histamine during fermentation too. I have lab tested my upgraded coffee beans, and they is also a histamine free, by design.
@Dave, thanks for the response. You stated that straight MCT oil would have the highest effect on cognition. Out of these 3: the Kerrygold butter, coconut oil or MCT oil–which one alone might help the most with fat loss? I’m about to go after those ‘last 15 pounds’ that are supposed to be so much fun to tackle. Not sure I’m going to get into the whole IF thing. Have been pretty much eating paleo, dropping most grains and sugar since August.
Due to your response, have just started looking into the floride in tea thing. At least some folk claim that the floride in tea is calcium floride (allegedly harmless), whereas what’s in drinking water is sodium floride (harmful). Thoughs, data on this? I like matcha also, found a Taiwanese food grade at local Asian grocery store. Have some yerba mate sitting around that I haven’t had for quite a while; think I’ll try Bulletproofing that. As for the Kerrygold cheese, I meant that it tasted fantastic, not that it was neccessarily good *for* you; should have been more clear. Have disciplined myself to just a 1 inch cube at a time. Finally, I think it’s fascinating that you and Tim Ferriss have approached some of the same problems, spending similar amounts of money on self-research, at nearly the same time. When I tell people about BC, I liken this to how Leibnitz and Newton invented calculus at the same time.
@Michael: Appreciate your recommendation of Bluebeard and Metronome in Tacoma. I’m coming in ‘cold’ from way out of state, don’t know a thing about the SeaTac area, other than that Frasier was the most brilliant television comedy ever written.
@Roland, The answer on fat loss is very clear. MCT oil is going to completely win from a fat loss perspective. (that’s why I make Upgraded MCT Oil that is 100% MCT with no additives/flavors/colors etc)
I haven’t done enough research on the fluoride tea issue to offer a qualified opinion on calcium vs sodium.
Yeah, I like how Tim approaches biohacking too. I’m curious how it will impact his opinions if he decides to have children. I learned a lot about bio hacking from that process. No doubt both Tim and I would be amused to be compared with trailblazers like Leibnitz and Newton! Thank you.
If I put fermented vegetables in my coffee I would find it pretty disgusting as well. Maybe you should’ve stuck to the original recipe instead?
The MCT’s/coconut oil was still a good choice, though.
I think plenty of people might actually see if a difference by drinking a coffee with MCT/coconut oil and grass-fed butter in there and not using any kind of sugar or dairy. I think we’re talking about the Average American who doesn’t diet at all and is far deficient in n-3 fatty acids and eats far too many carbohydrates, never mind grains/gluten and refined foods.
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Very interesting to read your views on the ‘bulletproof coffee’ recipe. in all my years I stayed away from what I thought coffee to be not consumed but only beneficial for enemas. I am now convinced and a walking testimonial that drinking the highest quality coffee WITH butter and MCT oil to start my day is a gift I look forward to every morning. The clarity, energy and feeling I receive from my new concoction is special. Have a great day!