Clear Conscience, Stained Teeth

By the third cup of the day I’m already past caring about the yellow. Coffee has been staining teeth since coffee existed, and I’ve made my peace with the tradeoff. But the idea behind Clear Coffee—a transparent, colorless drink that supposedly tastes like the real thing—is interesting enough to sit with for a moment.

The founders, brothers David and Adam Nagy, developed it out of personal frustration. We are heavy coffee drinkers, David explained. Like many people, we noticed our teeth were getting darker. There was nothing on the market to deal with this, so we developed our own recipe. The result is a bottled cold-brew that looks exactly like water—same caffeine, same flavor profile, stripped of the pigment that does the cosmetic damage.

Whether it actually delivers on that promise, I genuinely don’t know. But there’s something almost philosophical about removing the one visible sign of a habit while keeping the habit itself entirely intact. The stain was honest, at least.