Muddying the Waters

Is MUD WTR's marketing the most appetizing thing about it?

“Relaxing tea better fucking work.”

-The Onion

Buzzed & curious

Contrary to what the MUD WTR founder might have hoped, I was not under the influence of adaptogenic mushrooms, holotropic breath work, or an ashwagandha-laced meditation retreat, but rather Scrimshaw Pilsner from North Coast Brewing ten miles up the coast. While Mendocino is a veritable landscape painting of a town during the day, at night and in the dead of winter, a watering hole aptly named Dick’s is the only thing happening after the depressingly early sunset. All roads lead to Dick’s after dark. There, wine moms visiting from Sebastopol sway like kelp as they proceed to talk your ear off about their house remodel while flannel-clad fisherman pound back shots while trading salty stories for sea salt & vinegar Kettle Chips before pausing to investigate who put Tubthumping by Chumbawumba on the jukebox for the fourth time in a row. So after stashing our stuff in a hotel that looked straight out of the videogame Red Dead Redemption, my friend Matt and I headed to dinner, before being pulled to Dick’s with the inevitability of migratory birds to meet our fate. It was after a few Scrimshaws at Dicks on that chilly February night that I impulsively ordered the coffee replacement MUD WTR for the first time. I now suspect that the MUD WTR people won’t be using this testimonial in their marketing, but in this economy who knows.

I’ve written copy for hundreds of Facebook, Youtube, and podcast ads in my life but have only ever bought something after being served a Youtube ad exactly once. MUD WTR was that once. Lying in a cramped hotel room, partway through a video explaining the causes of shark attacks, an enchanting ad about the benefits of sleep popped up. Uncharacteristically, I did not click to skip after five seconds. It may have been the beer, my fatigue, or a childish longing that comes from trying to fall asleep in a bed far from home, but I felt a tendril of curiosity emerge in the night. I decided to hear this soothing narrator out. As he held court on the downsides of hustle culture and the collective urge to rest we’d all been neglecting in our over-caffeinated capitalistic Riverdance I was nearly moved to tears. I’d heard of MUD WTR before but never understood the appeal of their coffee alternative. Yet this bedtime beverage he was pitching sounded like exactly what I needed in my life. So I fished my debit card out of the pocket of my pants on the floor and ordered the advertised “rest” blend. I also added on their signature “rise” blend, partly out of curiosity and partly so I could get free shipping. I then texted Alexis to let her know I’d impulse bought over one hundred dollars of adaptogenic tea the way she sometimes did with clothing after a few drinks. I now realize this is one of those texts you only start sending after age thirty.

Here is what happened next.

Unboxing & first impressions

The first thing that struck me about MUD WTR is that this is the type of company where long-winded people like me are given a disproportionate amount of power. I say this because the product won’t stop marketing itself to you even after you’ve already bought it. The cardboard box my coffee alternative came in opened up like a loquacious clam to unload a wall of text at me similar to the ranting word salad gracing the side of Dr Bronner’s soap. Imagine the vaguely appealing platitudes found on those ubiquitous Lululemon shopping bags and you get the gist of it. Unpacking the box I found still more content, including a slickly produced zine that I’ve got on my bedside table and a wholesome sticker that said “Support your local sunset,” that I promptly slapped on the laptop that typed these words. MUD WTR’s content is, in my biased opinion, the strongest part of the brand.

The colorful zine booklet each product comes with is remarkably thorough and I un-ironically read it for fun before bed. From the confident proclamation on the cover “Your new morning ritual,” founder Shane Heath proceeds to grab your hand and power walk you through the MUD WTR cinematic universe. For a non-mandatory part of the product experience, its intensity, breadth, and depth is surprising. This earnest zine is packed with a habit tracker, pages on the benefits of meditation, breath work, and journaling, and an impassioned plea for the legalization of psychedelics. The pages are also peppered with pithy new age quotes like “What we call reality is in fact nothing more than a culturally sanctioned and linguistically reinforced hallucination.” Woah. The list of MUD products and a plug for their subscription model are at the end, almost as an afterthought.

MUD WTR is an a very content-forward company. Ever since I bought my shipment I’ve been getting re-targeted with their Youtube ads every time I watch anything, so at this point I know know the marketing copy as well as if I wrote it. My assessment is that their ads are ultimately about a worldview more than a product. In them, the founder critiques capitalism and caffeine addiction with the lucid intensity of a Michael Pollan book. His narration is so fervent and heartfelt that you at times forget this is an advertisement and not a student project. He’s not advocating for a beverage, however; he’s advocating for a whole lifestyle and aesthetic philosophy. You get the sense that in the eyes of the founder, being the kind of person who drinks MUD WTR means you’re also implicitly endorsing lots of other choices. You don’t just start your day with a different drink than other people, you’re also meditating, journaling, and breathing more thoughtfully than the coffee crowd, while advocating for the legalization of psychedelics, too. Don’t take my word for it, though. Here’s the first paragraph of the MUD zine’s section on “Mud culture”:

“We don’t tap kegs or throw pizza parties. That sh*t’s weak. Our team meditates, cold plunges, and even does some deep eye-gazing. (Ya scared?) Maybe you think we’re gonna bust out some Hula-Hoops and “charged” crystals next but pump the brakes, because there’s a method to our mudness.”

Good to know.

The irony of MUD WTR is that after getting it in the mail, the reason you bought it ends up feeling trivial compared to why they sold it to you according to the impassioned missives enclosed. It feels like you were invited to a potluck only to discover it was actually a cult meeting. It’s funny that for a beverage, the flavor ends up feeling like the elephant in the room. So how does it taste, anyway?

The flavor and effects

MUD WTR is marketed as a coffee replacement that is gentler on your mind and body. The main ingredients of the flagship “rise” blend are a masala chai tea, plus cacao, a handful of “so-hot-right-now” adaptogenic mushrooms like cordyceps, chaga, and reishi, plus a sprinkle of cinnamon, turmeric, and Himalayan salt for good measure. They claim it has 1/7th as much caffeine as a cup of brewed coffee while the supporting cast of trendy ingredients provides additional focus, energy, antioxidants and immune and mood support. In their words: “The result: you, but superhuman.”

To be really blunt, neither of their flagship products tastes great. The “rise” product tastes like an earthier spinoff of Chai, with the edges of the black tea and spices filed down by the pervasive earthy funk of fungus. The “rest” version really leans into the MUD part of the name. I think it tastes like potting soil. While the “rise” flavor is tea-like enough to sip, I don’t sip “rest” as much as I gulp until it’s mercifully gone and I’m hopefully more relaxed.

I enjoy the experience of drinking MUD WTR much more than the odd flavor. The “rise” product in particular fits quite well into my creative work. A cup of it has enough stimulation to get my brain going for a bout of writing after breakfast, but it doesn’t upset my stomach, flare up my anxiety, or shorten my attention span to that of a hummingbird the way too much coffee does. At its best, I get into these addictive creative eddies under the influence of MUD. I can’t tear myself away from whatever I’m working on but each break to flip on the electric kettle and add more water to the dregs of the MUD that haven’t fully dissolved yields an atmospheric river of insights pouring inexplicably into my brain. I end up reluctantly breaking for lunch out of sheer biological necessity at one forty five on days like this. It’s hard to tell how much MUD’s role in my swells of creativity is causation, correlation, or joyous placebo, but having a beverage like this to incorporate into a creative ritual has felt very nice. It’s also made the fancy matcha my sister got me for Christmas, my other go-to writing fuel, last much longer.

What about the “rest” blend? Has it helped me build better sleep hygiene? Is my bedtime ritual so sound that it would make Andrew Huberman gasp aloud as if I’d just hit the bulls eye on the cold plunge dunk tank I assume he sits on while recording his long-winded podcasts? Not to flex too hard, but I’m something of an authority on bedtime teas. No, I haven’t gotten a tattoo of the Celestial Seasonings Sleepytime tea bear just yet, but I’ve dreamed about it. What I have done is try every kind of bedtime tea on the market during my COVID-induced insomnia, from Yogi’s Soothing Caramel bedtime to Traditional Medicinal’s Night Night with Valerian, the bedtime equivalent of ordering an AMF at a bar. My assessment is that “rest” by MUD falls somewhere in the middle, not exactly like imbibing a lullaby, but definitely contributing to an overall sense of calm. As with the “rise,” it’s hard to tell how much this effect is specifically the ingredients in the muddy mix, or just that I’ve started to drink it when I have the intention to wind down. I’m a cheerleader for the placebo effect these days, so either way I think it can fit snugly into a bedtime routine. That said, it’s is also definitely not delicious or terribly strong, so it’s never a highlight of going to bed for me.

The drinking experience of both MUD beverages I tried is somewhat hamstrung by the fact that they never fully dissolve in your mug. This is despite the valiant efforts of the helpfully provided electric frother and the detailed instructions on the packaging that border on profuse apologies for how stubbornly their beloved MUD behaves. So inevitably at the end of a mug of MUD I end up swirling the dregs, trying in vain to get them to incorporate into something I can comfortably drink. This can lead to some frustration and awkward spills. One time I was frantically swirling my MUD “rise” so I could gulp it down and keep writing when my twirling motion instead spilled the liquid all over my pants, couch, and rug. This is when I understood that MUD WTR has a non-trivial amount of turmeric in it. Spilling it causes stains that are ironically even harder to get out than coffee stains. My rug looked like I’d slaughtered a watercolor painter and failed to the hide the evidence. Frantically dabbing our Ruggable with everything from vinegar to soda water before Alexis got home from work, I felt like I was in a fever dream, a painter’s version of “The Tell-Tale Heart.”

MUD vs Coffee: Endgame

According to MUD WTR’s barrels of ink spilled on the topic, the ideological chess game they’re playing is against “Big Coffee,” which they portray as a capitalist conspiracy to wring as much productivity out of our exhausted brains as possible at the expense of our collective joy and humanity. In reality, people have a diverse array of relationships with coffee, ranging from a thoughtless daily jolt to an indulgent luxury good. I’d posit that most people on that spectrum expect energy, not enlightenment from their morning beverage.

The experience of actually drinking MUD is decidedly non-coffee-like in terms of flavor and caffeine content. Unlike Four Sigmatic, whose mushroomy blends contain a small amount of coffee and tastes somewhat like it, MUD’s closest cousin in flavor and effect is just black tea. It neither revs up your engine in the trademark way coffee does nor tastes anything like it, so while I enjoy drinking it, I have trouble imagining anyone seamlessly swapping MUD for coffee. In my case, I’ve merely added MUD as a less intense alternative to having a second cup of coffee. I still start my day with a French press to share with Alexis over breakfast. So the idea of dethroning coffee for good seems like a stretch to me, despite the founders confident essays on the subject.

The question for MUD is how much you can be defiantly against an entrenched competitor like coffee if your rival product delivers a categorically different experience, has much grander ambitions, and may appeal to an entirely different audience? It’s not even in the realm of comparing apples to oranges, requiring a new class of analogy. Saying that MUD WTR is competing with coffee is like saying The Golden State Warriors are competing with the musical Cats. Sure, both are forms of entertainment, but they have such different mediums, vibes, and reasons to consume them that it feels odd lumping them in together in the first place. You also wonder if converting fans of one to fans of the other is all that possible much less advisable as a long-term strategy.

I’m not alone in this assessment. In their review of MUD, usually neutral and reserved Wirecutter came out and bluntly advised readers about MUD as follows:

“If you enjoy the taste of coffee, need to get away from caffeine, and want some of the many nutritional benefits that mushrooms can provide, find a good decaf coffee. Then, enjoy it with a nice mushroom omelet.”

Ouch.

MUD certainly did pick a good moment to shoot their shot, though. We’re living at a time when more of us are willing to re-think the beverages once presented as unquestionable defaults like coffee and alcohol. We see this in the boom in NA beverages driven by a “sober curious” wave of millennials and Gen-Zers. Yet I’m not yet convinced that MUD’s product is as good or widely relevant as their self-assured marketing believes it to be.

MUD WTR’s outspoken content claims that a paradigm shift is needed in how we begin and end our days. I happen to agree. I also happen to like, but not love their flagship product. Yet while their marketing contains keenly observed and well-polished kernels of truth, I’m still unsure if MUD WTR is in fact the change they wish to see in the world. I’m not even sure if I’ll even order more of it once my stylishly designed tin runs out. My beloved matcha has the same premium price and anti-oxidant content but harbors no delusions of grandeur. I remain skeptical that one beverage can cause the kind of societal reframe they’re talking about, but this may just be my cynicism speaking.

I’m still unclear if MUD WTR is over-indexing on their messaging because it’s what they care about most or if it’s the only realm where they think they can truly win as a brand. Misconceptions about sleep and hustle culture appear to be easier to dissolve than their products. What’s undeniable is that the main thing definitively setting MUD WTR apart from coffee for me is its eccentric and charismatic marketing. Yet as I know from personal experience, marketing can be fun and it can be quite effective, but good marketing alone is not the same as a viable product or a scalable company, much less a social movement. Marketing that’s in denial of these realities risks trafficking in articulate delusions.