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Comment by ndsipa_pomu | Hacker News Reader

What puzzles me about the reported birth of coffee is that I wouldn't expect that just eating the cherries would give you that much of a caffeine kick to be noticeable. Yes, there's a little bit of caffeine in them, but far more in the "beans" (seeds).

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Tea also has noticeably less caffeine than coffee, yet it has been treated as an energizing drink since it was first discovered.

When you don't have any adrenal stimulants in your diet at all, even a small amount is noticable.

Caffeine also has a metabolic half life of roughly 5 hours in the body, if I remember correctly. A few berries might not do much, but surely a handful will be enough.

Tea leaves usually have more caffeine than coffee beans, but tea itself is usually more diluted than coffee.

If you want a jolt, make a matcha shot with the same mass of matcha as you would normally do for coffee ;)

Or a traditional Maté

Somehow caffeine from Maté feels different though. To me coffee gives a fast spike and then comedown, while Maté's effect is more balanced, and lasts longer. And I don't think it's just caffeine content, because tea is nothing like that for me.

For staying productive for hours, nothing beats Maté for me (except stimulant medication).

Tea bushes use an entirely different metabolic pathway to produce caffeine than coffee bushes.

Here is an article that further describes how we believe caffeine synthesis evolved in multiple land plant lineages.

https://www.pnas.org/content/113/38/10613

Caffeine synthesis involves several enzymes, but the enzyme family (called the SABATH family) involved in the final stages of its synthesis can trace its origins back to the first land plants. These first enzymes are thought to have been very promiscuous (capable of having activity with several molecules), partially contributing to how caffeine synthesis managed to evolve independently multiple times throughout the evolutionary history of land plants.

This is why I routinely wean myself from coffee by drinking tea on most holiday weekends. I feel it helps me to dissociate less while I should be present with family, plus when I return to work I have much less residual caffeine and can hit peak productivity, crank out some code. Props to devs who don’t rely on drugs!

We’re probably used to higher levels of caffeine now, but if we weren’t, maybe chewing the berries would give a noticeable boost.

Kinda like ok you can eat a poppy but then there’s a reason morphine exists. (Sorry for the stupid analogy ;)

If you truly detox from caffeine even extremely small amounts will be noticeable. I knew a woman who couldn't eat chocolate because she found the amount of caffeine to be too high. I didn't even know there was caffeine in chocolate.

> I knew a woman who couldn't eat chocolate because she found the amount of caffeine to be too high.

I think the causality went the other way in that case. I've been roughly caffeine free at certain intervals. Never felt anything from chocolate.

I went almost caffeine free at one point. I once got a good buzz from 300g of 90% chocolate.

I say "almost" caffeine free because I still regularly ate chocolate. So I still had a little tolerance. Yet the difference between 50g of milk chocolate and 300g of 90% was very noticeable.

Not judging but to me 300 grams of chocolate, dark or otherwise, is an outright obscene amount

Go ahead and judge. It was an obscene amount.

Depends on the chocolate type and how much you're eating. Milk chocolate has very low levels (~2mg per 28oz), but dark chocolate is ~15mg per 28oz. Coffee, at 24oz, would be around 275mg, depending.

I find it hard to believe that some folks would feel the caffeine in chocolate unless they ate an entire dark chocolate bar in one sitting, but I suppose it's possible.

I think that 28oz of dark chocolate, whether weight or volume, would be a ludicrous amount to eat in one sitting. A chocolate bar is about 1.5 oz (and 1 fluid ounce of water weighs 1 ounce, at least to a rough approximation), so to eat 28 you'd need to eat nearly 20 chocolate bars.

For that matter 24oz is rather a lot of coffee to drink at once. I brew my daily coffee with 200g of water, or only about 7 floz.

While I realize I'm an outlier, I do NOT consider 24oz of coffee a lot, nor does anyone I know--that's literally a standard coffee cup at a coffee shop these days. At a minimum, I'm drinking 3 pots (~180oz) of coffee a day, with my usual being 3-4x that amount.

So; with that said, while I believe that eating 28oz of chocolate is a lot, I guess it could happen :-)

HN is crazy for outliers. We have the lady who gets wired off a chocolate bar, and the guy who drinks over a gallon per day.

But anyway, I've been to a coffee shop or two, and I've never seen a "standard cup" as anything other than 12 ounces.

Wait, on a typical day you're drinking 4-5.5 gallons of coffee? 180oz * 3-4? So 540-720oz?

That's not just an outlier, that's absurd. At 100mg caffeine per 8oz of coffee, that's over 6 grams of coffee per day, or more than 15 times the amount generally considered safe.

Not to diminish the outlandishness, but I think the parenthetical is misapplied.

(3 pots of coffee) is about (180 oz).

But the comment also said "with my usual being 3-4x that amount". I don't know how to square the math in that comment except to interpret it as "180oz is my minimum, my usual is 3-4 times as much as 180oz".

Yes; I drink upwards of 10 pots of coffee a day. However, due to the rise in coffee prices as of late, I have curtailed my consumption a little.

A minute ago I was absolutely certain you would literally die if you drank that much.

I will literally die, some day. I was caffeine free for 7 years before kids and grad school and startup work.

I’m never making that mistake again and I’m making up for lost time.

Godspeed.

You might want to double-check your figures.

Ghiradelli claims their dark chocolate has 20mg per oz and their milk chocolate has 6 mg per ounce. [1]

That would mean eating a standard 3.5oz/100g chocolate bar would have 70mg of caffeine for dark, or 21mg for milk.

While 3.5oz is a lot in a sitting, 70mg is equivalent to a smallish cup of coffee.

[1] https://www.ghirardelli.com/product-faqs#:~:text=Dark%20choc...

>If you truly detox from caffeine even extremely small amounts will be noticeable.

Maybe for a subset of people. Otherwise kids will be getting crazy jitters the first time they eat chocolate (presumably before they ever drank coffee/tea), which obviously doesn't happen.

I recall preferring lighter chocolate as a kid. Maybe we’re accidentally providing kids with a slowly ramping caffeine tolerance, haha.

They call the cherries cascara, and I have come across them in some specialty coffee shops packaged just like the beans. You can pour hot (not boiling) water over them and prepare a tea-like infusion. It tastes sweet-ish without adding anything else. It gives a pretty noticeable kick to me when I drink it, even though I am a regular coffee drinker. I think it is worth a try, if you haven't done so yet.

> I wouldn't expect that just eating the cherries would give you that much of a caffeine kick to be noticeable

If you're paying attention to your body and you're not addicted to stimulants, then a small kick of caffeine would absolutely be noticeable.

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