We Tried the Mushroom Coffee So You Don't Have To Side-Eye It At Someone Else's Desk
There's a rhythm to the espresso machine in the Đà Nẵng office. First cup around nine, fine. Second cup before the eleven o'clock stand-up, still fine. Third cup is when Mạnh starts talking faster than his code ships. Fourth cup is when someone on marketing gets visibly jittery on a client call and has to sit on her hands to stop gesturing at the screen. Nobody plans it this way. It just accumulates, cup by cup, until two in the afternoon feels like the inside of a dryer.
So when Vy left a bag of mushroom coffee powder on the shared counter, the reaction was the reaction you'd expect from a room full of people who write ad copy for a living: a lot of squinting. "10-in-1 adaptogen blend" is the kind of phrase that sets off alarms in a marketing office before it sets off any actual interest. Thảo picked up the bag, read the label, and said what she always says about anything with too many claims stacked on one line: "That's not a product, that's a paragraph." Fair. But she also poured herself a cup, because free coffee is free coffee, and by the following week it had quietly become the thing people reached for instead of round four of espresso.
The bag in question is Catfit Instant Mushroom Coffee Powder, an instant blend built around lion's mane, chaga, and cordyceps alongside a handful of other mushrooms and adaptogens, positioned as a lower-caffeine alternative to a normal cup.
Who Actually Needs This
Not everyone, and not as a replacement for your morning cup if what you actually want is a wall of caffeine. This sits better with a specific type of person.
- ☕️ Anyone doing the third-or-fourth-cup math and looking for something that doesn't end in a 3pm crash
- ✈️ Frequent flyers who want something instant and shelf-stable for a hotel kettle, no grinder or plunger required
- 🍵 People who already drink herbal or adaptogen blends and want one that tastes like coffee instead of dirt
- 🧠 Anyone who wants to cut caffeine volume without cutting the ritual of holding a hot mug at their desk
If you're someone who needs a proper jolt to function before 10am, this isn't going to do that job. It's not trying to.
What It Gets You
The mushroom part
The blend leans on lion's mane, chaga, and cordyceps, the three mushrooms that show up in most of these products, stacked with other adaptogens under the "10-in-1" label on the packaging. Whether ten separate ingredients each meaningfully move the needle in one cup of instant powder is the kind of claim Thảo would want a source for before she'd repeat it in an ad. What's verifiable is simpler: it's a lower-caffeine instant coffee with mushroom extract folded in, and it tastes like coffee, not like a supplement someone tried to disguise.
Format and packs
It's instant, so it dissolves in hot water straight in the cup, no equipment beyond a kettle. It comes in a couple of pack sizes, useful if you're testing it out before committing a cupboard shelf to it.
💡 Tien's Note
Straight black, it reads thinner than a real espresso shot, which is the point but also worth knowing going in. The reviewers who liked it best either drank it black and expected an herbal-leaning cup, or added their usual creamer and stopped noticing the difference from a normal instant coffee entirely.
The Honest Version
Sitting at 4.4 stars off 570 ratings, which is solid for something this specific. The good reviews cluster around two things: it tastes closer to actual coffee than people expected from a mushroom blend, and several people specifically credited it with steadier energy through the day instead of a caffeine spike and drop. One reviewer who mixes it into a regular cup of coffee said she gets the flavor and whatever health benefit she's after without giving up her usual brew entirely, which is probably the most realistic way to use it.
The caveats are real too. At least one reviewer landed on three stars and called it flavorless, flat out saying it wasn't worth the money for what she tasted. A few others admitted upfront that they don't usually like instant coffee at all and only came around to this one after adding flavored creamer, which tells you the base flavor is doing less work than the marketing implies. If you're expecting a rich, dark-roast punch, temper that. This is closer to a mild, earthy instant cup that some people dress up and some people don't bother finishing.
Nobody in the office claims it fixed their gut health or cleared brain fog, whatever "10-in-1" is supposed to promise. What it did was give the afternoon slump crowd something to reach for that isn't a fifth espresso, and that's a lower bar than the label sets, but it's the bar that actually got cleared.
It's not replacing the espresso machine. It's sitting next to it, for the days when four cups feels like three too many.
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