Can Coffee Make You Drunk, and Why Are Young People Brewing at Home?

No, coffee cannot make you drunk in the alcoholic sense, and the question can coffee make you drunk usually traces back to caffeine's effects rather than alcohol. The real shift is behavioral: after repeated food safety scandals at tea brands, more young people are skipping Luckin and Heytea and brewing coffee and milk tea at home.

Ingredient suppliers to these brands have gone public one after another, showing where the margins sit. Meanwhile, homemade tutorial videos spread fast online, and bloggers monetize through endorsements, lifting ingredient brands such as Fino. The habit raises a separate question, can coffee get you high, which is about caffeine, not intoxication.

In recent years, suppliers in the tea beverage and coffee markets have gone public one after another, revealing the profit truths behind the brands. However, as food safety issues and health concerns in the new tea beverage industry keep emerging, more and more young people are abandoning brands like Luckin and Heytea, and instead becoming obsessed with making their own coffee and milk tea. With the convenience of the internet and a wealth of tutorials, homemade drinks have become a traffic password, and bloggers are monetizing through product endorsements, which has also made ingredient brands like Fino popular. This article takes an in-depth look at the reasons and effects behind this phenomenon, and explores the impact of homemade drinks on the traditional tea beverage and coffee market.

Recently, a group of companies supplying ingredients to tea beverage and coffee brands have successively entered the capital market, a piece of news that surprised many people. As the saying goes, middlemen earn the price difference, but while brands like Luckin and Heytea fight tooth and nail on the front stage, in the end the biggest beneficiaries turn out to be the suppliers behind them. And now, these "middlemen" are likely to face new challenges.

Rather than waiting endlessly for affordable milk tea and quietly putting up with high coffee prices, today's young people are enjoying the convenience brought by the rapid development of the internet. A huge number of homemade tutorial videos circulate online, making many young surfers fall in love with the fun of making coffee and milk tea with their own hands.

Since the outbreak of the pandemic, the new tea beverage industry has been charging ahead, one cup from you and one from me, enough to drink Nayuki's Tea all the way onto the Hong Kong stock market. But the good times did not last long. Along with the industry's popularity, many food safety problems were exposed. First, the kitchen hygiene at Nayuki's Tea was worrying; then Guming Milk Tea was reported to use expired ingredients; during this period, many milk tea brands were also frequently tipped off by netizens after customers found foreign objects in their drinks. These objects were all sorts of things—cockroaches, flies, geckos, spiders... just looking at them was enough to make one's skin crawl.

After that, many news reports pointed out that consumers who drank milk tea for a long time or in excess developed health problems such as gout, high blood pressure, and high blood lipids, and some were even admitted to the ICU because of it.

Against the backdrop of the pandemic, people's awareness of managing their own health has been growing. But milk tea still has to be drunk, and all one can do is try to avoid inferior products as much as possible.

On some popular online platforms, "homemade drinks" has become a high-frequency search term. On Xiaohongshu, there are more than 1.31 million notes related to "homemade drinks"; on Weibo, the topic "homemade drinks" has surpassed 100 million views.

At present, homemade drinks, which are not technically demanding, have become a traffic password. A few simple image-and-text posts, or a 15-second short video, can easily attract a large amount of attention. Open any drink blogger's tutorial at random, and the various fruits, dairy products, and other ingredients—when you think about it, aren't they all things you can easily get around you?

Today, online shopping is already quite mature. You just need to choose the goods in a mobile app, place an order and pay, and at most wait half a week, and everything will be delivered to your door. So young people, step by step, fall into the "pit" of homemade drinks.

Some bloggers also share homemade drinks every day, using this to build up followers and increase interaction by assigning homework, thereby gaining higher fan loyalty. The red ocean of new tea drinks and coffee, originally a battleground for capital, has been played with in new ways by drink bloggers.

Of course, pure sharing and communication do not exist. Traffic accumulated over time must ultimately be monetized, and earning money is the core demand. In videos posted by some drink bloggers, although no obvious advertising traces can be seen, a little attention will reveal clues to product promotion, such as a certain brand's equipment frequently appearing on screen, or a certain brand's ingredients being used in the drink, and so on.

After Luckin's coconut latte became popular, homemade drink bloggers quickly pushed Fino from behind the scenes to the front stage. Because it was easy to replicate and had a high success rate, the homemade coconut latte was once extremely popular. Fino also successfully broke out of its niche as a result, appearing in many milk tea shops and cafes.

Successfully recreating a drink with your own hands brings a strong sense of accomplishment. Rather than worrying about inferior ingredients and substandard hygiene, it is more enjoyable to recreate it yourself. The threshold for homemade drinks is low, and young people, relying on their own strength, have opened up a new path in the crowded tea beverage and coffee track. For brands like Heytea and Luckin, this is undoubtedly another major test.

Image source: Internet

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The above content is compiled by CoffeeHunters, a coffee news website.