Crank It Up

The Meth Coffee company model is a terrorist cell. Employees go by code names like "The Roaster" and "The Driver," and use a "dealer" system to help sell their stash. Its marketing style could most kindly be described as aggressive: A commercial for the new locally roasted coffee features a straight-laced tie-wearing type descending further into addiction with each gulp, until he's eating, snorting, and freebasing the beans, then shooting up and grabbing a turkey baster to give himself a coffee enema. Mmm, give me some of that.

Still, an anonymous company operative known as "The Drinker" (star of the aforementioned ad) insists that the product, a blend of organic fair-trade coffee and the natural stimulant yerba maté, isn't named Meth Coffee to glamorize the use of methamphetamines or other illegal activities. It's just realistic.

"Coffee is edgy, it's addictive," says the Drinker, who works at one of the distribution centers scattered at undisclosed locations around the city, by phone. "Drugs are a metaphor for it."

These caffeinated rebels say their aim is to shatter coffee's cozy image, which they call "venti culture." But they must have expected some criticism over the name, especially after last fall's hubbub over Cocaine Energy Drink.

Indeed, not everybody finds meth marketing amusing. One Web posting encouraged people to send the company "meth isn't funny" e-mails. Mission District resident Jeremy Leaird-Koch posted before-and-after pictures of one meth addict on his online journal. "I wholeheartedly agree that there is some 'powerful shit' going on here, but it's not the effects of the coffee," he wrote. "It's this recent scourge of marketing amphetamines as a fun, hip product."

He admits that he's snorted and tripped with the best of them, but calls the marketing tasteless and clueless — and says any company based in a city with a longtime meth problem should know better. (S.F. ranks among the top meth markets in the country, according to the National Drug Intelligence Center.)

Still, the small staff of Meth Coffee doesn't seem too worried about the reaction. Led by their anonymous founder, "The Roaster," they appear to be relishing their image as the bad boys of the coffee world.

"If people can't handle a trip on the big brown meth coffee dragon," the Drinker says, "then they shouldn't swallow."