Against the Golden Drink

Club Mate tastes like punishment on the first sip. Something herbally wrong, bitter in a way that takes three or four cans to start reading as acceptable, and then eventually as necessary. I’ve been drinking the stuff for the better part of a decade—not because I enjoy it but because it keeps me from putting my head on the desk at two in the afternoon. It’s functional. It’s ugly. Berlin runs on it.

So when four guys from Moabit decided they’d had enough and set out to make something better, I was curious. Their answer was Disco-Limo: an organic lemon soda with caffeine derived as a byproduct of decaffeinating coffee beans. The caffeine that would otherwise go to waste ends up in a lemon drink instead. There’s a satisfying logic to that—nothing discarded, everything repurposed.

The whole thing started on the first of May, 2017, during a party. They wanted a caffeine hit that wasn’t synthetic or industrial, found nothing on offer, and decided to make it themselves. CEO Alexandros Krull described wanting something that combined good taste, sustainability, and social engagement. The ingredients were fully organic—the lemon, the caffeine. In bars, around two-fifty a bottle. In organic markets, about half that.

Whether it actually beats Club Mate at its own game is a question I’m not sure matters. That drink has too much mythological weight in this city to be dislodged by something rational and lemon-scented. But the appeal of Disco-Limo was never really displacement—it was the idea of staying up late on something you felt okay about consuming, something made with a bit of thought rather than just extracted from a warehouse. That’s a narrower promise than "replace Club Mate," but it’s an honest one. I hope the lemon was good.