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Comment by hombre_fatal | Hacker News Reader

Almost seems like you're trying to sensationalize it by changing it to Red Bull, something that's actually pretty low in caffeine once you put marketing aside.

How about comparing it to Starbucks' regular hot coffee sizes?

- Short - 180 mg

- Tall - 260 mg

- Grande - 330 mg

- Venti - 415 mg

Is drinking a 12oz Tall at Starbucks really dropping your jaw?

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That's a fair point, Starbucks coffee has more caffeine than an average cup of coffee. I'm sure many people (including myself) are not aware of that.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/five-myths-about-caf...

The amount of caffeine in a coffee depends on its extraction method, the grind, and to a lesser extent on roast. An espresso actually has much less caffeine than a cup of drip (60mg vs 200mg). Generally the longer you leave the beans exposed to water the more caffeine comes out, up to about 400 minutes when making cold brew. [1]

I doubt Starbucks is deviously out to over-caffeinate its customers (although if they were, they've got my vote!) but rather the difference is attributable to variations in their brewing process.

There's a limit to the amount of caffeine that can possibly come out of a bean, and so I would say that unless there's evidence they're spiking the brew, that Starbucks coffee is roughly the definition of an "average cup of coffee"

A Venti is 590mL and 415mg of caffeine, 700mg/L of coffee. Based on the chart in [1] that would be roughly speaking the midpoint of roast kind at the 150 minute mark making cold brew, 10g/100mL of coffee beans (Figure 1). Or approximately a dark roast, coarse grind hot brew (Figure 3).

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5740146/

I get so tired of people equating espresso with high amounts of caffeine. I don't know where that originated... maybe because of the high temp / pressure extraction and the oils making it so much richer?

Well it is much higher caffeine/volume, it's just that you (typically) drink a much lower volume of it.

A Starbucks Espresso shot has 75mg at 1oz.

A Starbucks dark roast (short size) has 130mg at 8oz - that is 16.25mg/oz.

That means the espresso has 4.6x the caffeine per volume. I’d say those people you’re tired of have something worth listening to.

https://globalassets.starbucks.com/assets/94fbcc2ab1e2435985...

But look who I was responding to: people think a single shot of espresso had more caffeine than a cup of coffee and that is not true.

Starbucks drinks typically have 2 shots (such as a grande mocha) which gonna be around the same amount of caffeine as a cup of coffee

A "cup" of coffee is officially 8oz and typically between 80 and 100mg.

Starbucks coffee doesn't really have a higher ratio of caffeine, just more volume than the official measurements.

That being said, I don't know anybody that drink 8oz cups of coffee.

I think the point is that there is a difference between a cup of filter coffee and an espresso drink (Americano, latte, cappuccino etc) with the same volume. The first one is well... coffee, the latter contains only a shot or two of espresso and the rest of the volume in the cup is hot water/milk.

I make coffee at home every day. I rarely go to places like Starbucks. I just measured my cup and it's 8 oz. I have one cup every morning.

Coffee "cups" are measured in units of 6 oz:

https://www.triplebarcoffee.com/blog/how-many-ounces-are-in-...

there's also an approximate 30% difference in caffeine between Arabica beans and robusta beans, the latter having more caffeine.

Starbucks use Arabica, typically Italian or French espresso based drinks ha e been made with robusta or an Arabica robusta blend.

Starbucks coffee is not higher in caffeine compared to other cafés, it can actually be lower. The only sig ificant difference is portion sizes, like you mentioned.

My understanding is that almost no one drinks 100% Robusta, since it tastes something between burnt tire, wood (not in a good way, in a 'trying to bite raw timber' kind of way) and rubber. However it's very commonly used as, in a positive interpretation, to accentuate the taste of Arabica since it produces more 'crema' on espresso, and in a negative interpretation, as an adulterant to make coffee cheaper to produce.

Here are some people writing about their experience of drinking 100% Robusta: https://old.reddit.com/r/Coffee/comments/6u2ef4/100_robusta_...

> An espresso actually has much less caffeine than a cup of drip (60mg vs 200mg).

I think espresso has more caffeine per ounce than coffee does.

> Is drinking a 12oz Tall at Starbucks really dropping your jaw?

Yes, absolutely. But I rarely consume caffeine so my experience is very different than yours.

The study used caffeine-naive individuals. That is, people without any caffeine experience or tolerance.

If you give two tall Starbucks coffees to a caffeine naive person, it will definitely cause some notable effects.

Frequent coffee drinkers tend to underestimate the impact of their caffeine tolerance. A seasoned coffee drinker consuming two of the strongest coffees on the market day after day is a different story than caffeine-naive individuals skipping straight to excessive doses of caffeine without any tolerance.

Still, not too many people are drinking 6x Red Bulls at once, the scenario you brought up as an example. Meanwhile swathes of the world are pulling into Starbucks daily, many for their first time.

It's also not two 12oz coffees, it's one at 8am and another at 5pm. It just kinda seems like everything you write here is trying to cause a reaction and it feels manipulative.

You write all this just to reveal your actual point:

> If you give two tall Starbucks coffees to a caffeine naive person, it will definitely cause some notable effects.

Well, sure. We can all agree on that. And one of the notable effects is increased fat oxidation. Notice how uninteresting this observation is by itself. No need to dress it up as something more.

Coffee is a lot more than caffeine, though. It contains a whole family of monoamine oxidase inhibitors, which have a host of effects on the nervous system.

That said, Red Bull very likely contains several types of flavonoids that also act as MAO-B inhibitors.

Coffee, on the other hand, contains both MAO-A and MAO-B inhibitors mainly from the Harmala alkaloid family. Some of the compounds are neurotoxic.

It seems like caffeine alone is an MAOI [1] and that decaf may not have the same effect [2] - very cool, thank you for sharing! I know there's a lot more in coffee too, so I'm looking forward to learning more.

[edit] Found this [3] which I assume is what you were talking about? Which I assume is the reason studies show it can act as an antidepressant [4]. Fascinating!

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23850513/

[2] https://www.jwatch.org/fw108796/2014/05/06/severe-hypertensi...

[3] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16139309/

[4] https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/313988#possible-ri...

Yes drinking two 12oz Talls at Starbucks every day is not good for your sleep.

Nespresso capsules have 60g for reference.

Do you mean mg rather than g?

Source? I drink a fair amount of coffee every morning (not any after 10am) and never had any sleep issues. The half life for caffeine is somewhere around 6 hours, no?

Closer to 10 or 12 for many, it has a high variance in humans.

Anecdata, but one tall (actually, even one short) at 8am will typically postpone the time I fall asleep by 4 hours and will typically reduce my sleep by an equal amount (i.e., I wake up at the same time despite falling asleep later).

I’ve run some experiments on myself, and this lasts for days at a time with one tall in the morning. If I keep at it for several days, I will crash early one evening, but still only sleep for 4 hours. It’s a nightmare for someone who typically sleeps 8 hours a night — I just feel fog-brained all the time. That said, workouts are super easy.

If I had a tall in the morning and evening on a regular basis, ugh... I can’t even imagine. I did this once for extra energy during a sports tournament (we won), but I basically had to drink myself to sleep each night.

Multiple doctors have told me that caffeine sensitivity varies from person to person, but I am on the unusually sensitive side.

It varies a lot. I can drink a pot of strong coffee before going to bed. I do this regularly, never any problem sleeping.

back when i was drinking coffee (gut has changed with age... i can't drink it anymore), It never stopped me from sleeping, it just made me not want to go to sleep.

If I knew i really needed to sleep i could at any time.

Source is Anecdotal. I respond very well to caffeine, though I am a bit dependant on it. My wife, nothing. I can drink a Monster and feel good.

I am 6' 240lbs, she is 4'6" and 90lbs. I can almost microdose caffeine depending on what I am doing... Sometimes it is an energy drink, sometimes cold brew undiluted, sometimes drop coffee. Shoot, at Starbucks I tend to be a "green eye" type of man and laugh when they ask if I want space for creamer.

Unless I pound back a massive amount of caffeine within 2-3 hours of bed I have no issues sleeping; then again, I have never had issues sleeping and the few times I do forget and drink caffeinated before bed, it only delays me a few hours or results in me reading a novel into the night.

To everyone replying - "i can sleep even after drinking 100 coffees" - caffeine consumption affects certain stages of your sleep even though you might fall asleep, source is the book 'why we sleep'. All stages of your sleep are important, so if you are only getting rem sleep it is not good.

Thanks for digging these up. I agree OP would have to try to avoid first looking at coffee.

It drops my jaw that anyone drinks that regularly.

Well, this massive million drinker meta-analysis of coffee consumption (high levels, 5 cups a day) shows it significantly improves cardiovascular health. [1]

> A nonlinear association between coffee consumption and CVD risk was observed in this meta-analysis. Moderate coffee consumption was inversely significantly associated with CVD risk, with the lowest CVD risk at 3 to 5 cups per day, and heavy coffee consumption was not associated with elevated CVD risk.

[1] https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/full/10.1161/circulationaha....

What does it do to every other disease? Doesn't say much if it looks at a single factor outcome.

Suffice to say, if there were meaningful risks from drinking normal amounts of coffee, it would be known by now. Its main drawback is that it makes people nervous and jittery if taken in excess.

One of the other major ones is that it can aggravate stomach problems like gastritis since both coffee (even decaf) and caffeine are said to stimulate stomach acid production.

Sleep problems as well and migraines.

I believe caffeine is both a treatment for, and a cause of headaches. [1] Excedrin for instance is a migraine treatment which includes Tylenol and caffeine.

[1] https://americanmigrainefoundation.org/resource-library/caff...

Reason it’s a treatment is helping absorption typically, but also, a lot of people’s headaches are from withdrawal so it helps in the way drinking a beer helps a hangover.

There is also a breadth of studies that show consumption is bad - I wouldn't cheer just yet.

I'm fairly confident none of them were million-person multi-year meta-analysis, although I'm always happy to be proven wrong. Do you have any broad, high-confidence studies you have in mind?

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