If you like your coffee like you like your Olympic powerlifters, this one’s for you. Because Viscous Coffee’s Asskicker brew is strong. Really strong. As in, get-your-heart-checked-out-by-a-doctor-ahead-of-time-to-make-sure-it-can-stand-the-abuse-it’s-about-to-take strong.
Literally — the Adelaide, Australia cafe’s coffee comes with a health warning on it, because one cup has five grams of caffeine in it. Five. Grams. To put that in perspective for you, that’s nearly 80 times more than a single shot of espresso, and half of what’s considered to be a lethal dose.
That health warning, though doesn’t keep people teens from taking the drink as a challenge. If anything, it draws them in. But cafe owner Steve Benington makes sure to do his due diligence. As he told The Advertiser, “I talk to them first, make sure they understand what they are doing, and people often think I’m trying to talk them out of it,” he said. “Some people love it and some are broken by it, but it’s all in the name of fun.”
The good news is, the Asskicker is plenty to sip on, so you can spread the pain throughout the day. (Just as long as you’ve got a bathroom available like, at all times.) It’s actually an iced coffee, made up of — are you ready for this? — four shots of espresso, four ounces of cold drip coffee brewed for ten days, and eight ice cubes made from cold drip coffee brewed for 48 hours, which, as Benington said, are each “approximately equivalent of a bit more than two shots of espresso in caffeine.” The drink is intended to be consumed over a period of three to four hours, and provides 12 to 18 hours of “sustained up-time.”
But sometimes that three-to-four hours thing can be difficult. “It’s pure coffee, it’s good quality, and that’s the only problem, it tastes so good that it’s hard to make it last as long as it should.”
So…time to tackle that massive household project? A new Monday routine? The Asskicker was actually designed with workers in mind — Benington created it for an ER nurse who needed to stay up for an unexpected overnight shift. “She consumed her drink over two days and it kept her up for almost three days,” he said. “I toned it down a little after that and the Asskicker was born.”
That said, if you think five grams of pure caffeine is too much for you personally, or have, you know, been diagnosed with a heart murmur in the past, the baristas at Viscous will happily customize the caffeine content to your needs. But where’s the fun in that?
