Monday Morning Coffee News

Happy Monday! It’s been a bit of a slow week for coffee in the news: Starbucks announced Starbucks For Life winners, it’s soon going to be easier for people to enjoy butter coffee in their home, and a new kind of coffee flour may soon be hitting the market.

Starbucks’ second Starbucks For Life sweepstakes came to an end last week with seven lucky grand prize winners – 5 in the U.S and 2 from Canada. The winners will each receive a 10K hammered gold “Ultimate Starbucks Card”, like the one shown on the left, engraved with their names, that entitles them to one free beverage or food item every day for the next 30 years.

For the last few years Bulletproof Coffee, toxin-free coffee with unsalted grass-fed butter and MCT Oil (“Brain Octane”) blended in, has been a hot trend in “bio-hacking” your way to losing weight and increasing mental clarity and focus. Some swear by it, but having to brew your morning coffee, stir in the MCT Oil and unsalted grass-fed butter and then blending until creamy can be a bit much to do every morning – enter Grass Fed Coffee, the world’s first ready to drink butter coffee. A can of cold brew Grass Fed Coffee contains all the ingredients and benefits of “normal” butter coffee, but with the convenience of being ready made and easily portable. Check out their Kickstarter campiagn video below:

You may remember when I first mentioned Coffee Flour a few years ago. Made by CF Global, the flour, called CoffeeFlour (no space) is made from the pulp that’s usually discarded from the coffee cherry in the process of extracting the bean. The flour has the consistency of cocoa power and a unique flavor of “floral, citrus and roasted fruit-type notes” as well as a host of nutritional benefits. Gram for gram, CoffeeFlour, which is more of a flour additive then a product to be used on its own, has 5x the fiber of whole grain wheat fiber, 84% less fat & 42 % more fiber than coconut flour, 3x the iron of spinach, 38% more antioxidants than pomegranates, 3x the protien of kale, 2x the potassium of a banana and contains 1/3rd as much caffeine as a cup of coffee per teaspoon. When I heard that coffee flour had recently been patented, I thought “wow, took them long enough.” – but the coffee flour currently making the news is a whole different creature. Created by Dan Perlman at Brandeis University, the coffee flour in question is actually made from green coffee beans that are parabaked to preserve the antioxidant chlorogenic acid (CGA) content (according to the inventors CGA is “beneficial in modulating sugar metabolism, controlling blood pressure and possibly treating heart disease and cancer”) and then cryogenically milled in liquid nitrogen. Each gram of the resulting coffee flour, which is also supposed to be blended into regular flours for baking, contains 1/4 as much caffeine as a cup of coffee and is supposed to have a pleasant nutter flavor. – I really wish at least one of them tasted like coffee 🙁