What is Bulletproof Coffee? Effects and Benefits of Bulletproof Coffee, Its Potential Harms, and How to Make It

Once upon a time, a coffee caused a huge stir in Hollywood. It claimed to deliver more energy in a short time than ordinary coffee, and to help reduce fat and produce weight loss over the long term. Everyone rushed to drink it, and for a while it was placed on a pedestal. This is Bulletproof Coffee.

What Is Bulletproof Coffee?

Wait a moment — the "bulletproof" here is not the group name you might be thinking of, and it does not mean the drink can stop bullets. It is called bulletproof because its inventor felt it offered something like the protection of a "bulletproof vest." What it guards against, though, is not bullets but body weight. Some people ask: how exactly does it protect you?

That brings us to the ingredients: black coffee, unsalted grass-fed butter, and MCT. Unsalted grass-fed butter is butter made from cows that eat only grass, and it has fat-burning properties. MCT is short for Medium Chain Triglycerides, an easily digested fat extracted from natural coconut oil. When consumed and metabolised, MCT can produce large amounts of ketones. Ketones are a form of cognitive enhancement the brain secretes when a person is hungry, allowing the body to burn fat as an energy source and partly fill the gap when sugar and carbohydrates are lacking. As you can see, the ingredients in this coffee can suppress the desire for sugar, other carbohydrates, and other substances that "fill" the body with fat after drinking. During that time the body stays in a fasting-like state because no food is taken in, and fat is burned continuously, producing the fat-loss effect.

According to Bulletproof Coffee founder Dave Asprey, the inspiration for inventing it came from Tibet. Here is what happened: during a trip there he drank a cup of butter tea and immediately felt energetic and extremely full. After returning home, he used Tibetan butter tea as his starting point and developed Bulletproof Coffee.

How to Make Bulletproof Coffee

So how do you make it? Very simply — prepare one shot of espresso, hot water, butter, and coconut oil. Coconut oil is used because it is easier to obtain than MCT. First, extract a shot of espresso (FrontStreet Coffee uses 20g of coffee powder here, extracted for 30 seconds to get 40ml of espresso), then add 200ml of hot water to make an Americano, or any black coffee. Add 15g of butter and one spoon of coconut oil, about 10ml, put everything in a blender, and mix well. That is it.

The drinking experience is not as greasy as you might imagine. Instead, it adds the fragrance of coconut and the richness of butter to the coffee's original flavour.

Does Bulletproof Coffee Really Prevent Weight Gain?

To be honest, Bulletproof Coffee can indeed produce the fat-loss effect described. But it is not the coffee doing the work; it is the two oils in the recipe. Even if you replaced the coffee with tea, you would still get the fat-loss effect. So the essence of drinking Bulletproof Coffee is really drinking oil.

FrontStreet Coffee does not recommend trying it casually, though, because drinking Bulletproof Coffee requires a sensible diet plan. If you keep eating high-sugar, high-calorie foods and expect Bulletproof to eliminate the fat, you will get the exact opposite result, since it is itself a high-calorie drink. What is more, drinking these two oils can easily trigger a series of negative reactions in people with weak digestion. For your own health, please be cautious.

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FrontStreet Coffee

No. 10, Bao'an Qianjie, Yandun Road, Dongshankou, Yuexiu District, Guangzhou, Guangdong Province

FrontStreet Coffee Recommendation

Bulletproof Coffee starts from an espresso or black coffee base, so it makes sense to begin with a bean that is full, sweet, and low in acidity. FrontStreet Coffee's Brazil Queen Estate fits that brief: pronounced nut, cocoa, and caramel aromas, a rounded, smooth mouthfeel, low acidity but strong sweetness. It is stable whether you brew it as pour-over, in a moka pot, or as espresso, and because Brazilian coffee has naturally good crema, it has long been a staple bean for home drinkers who like a traditional profile.

If you want a heavier, more savoury base for the butter and oil, FrontStreet Coffee's PWN Golden Mandheling is a classic. Produced by Indonesia's PWN company, it is held to strict standards: beans of 18 mesh and above, with fewer than 3 defective beans in a 300g green bean sample, meeting the top G1 standard, followed by three rounds of hand sorting. The result is a cleaner, sweeter cup, with the thick body and the distinctive earthy, herbal, clove, and woody notes that the region's wet-hulled processing is known for.