Marcel Winatschek

What Club Mate Was Always Trying to Be

The premise is straightforward: Mirth Provisions, a Washington state company, makes a cannabis-infused coffee drink called Legal—available in cream, cherry, and lemon—that combines caffeine and THC into a single bottle. Alert and high simultaneously: the two states most people want to occupy and least want to have to choose between.

Club Mate—the German caffeinated soft drink that became the unofficial beverage of every Berlin coworking space and hackathon table—has always occupied this quasi-functional mythology, the drink that signals you’re the kind of person who treats stimulants as productivity infrastructure. Cannabis coffee feels like the logical endpoint of that same philosophy. The difference is that being caffeinated and high is actually good, whereas Club Mate mostly just tastes like fermented yerba maté and ambient startup anxiety.

Washington state can legally sell this. Most of the world cannot. That particular asymmetry has its own flavor.