Why we started Sherpa Coffee.

Hi — my name is David Sherpa, and I'm a co-founder of Sherpa Coffee. This is why we started it.

I'm twenty-two. I'm a student, and for most of the last few years coffee was how every morning started — early classes, a full course load, never quite enough sleep. It gave me the kick I needed. It also gave me the jitters, and somewhere in the middle of the afternoon my energy would fall off a cliff. So I'd have another cup in the evening to get through the workload, and then I wouldn't sleep. The next morning I'd need coffee again.

That was the loop. I was stuck in it, and so was almost everyone I knew.

Then mushroom coffee started showing up everywhere in my feed. I read everything I could find, and the research turned out to be real — functional mushrooms are genuine adaptogens, studied for how they support focus, energy, immunity and recovery. So I switched to one of the big brands.

It tasted good. That was all it did.

I gave it several months. None of what the packaging promised ever showed up. And I was watching it happen around me — classmates of mine buying the same brands, drinking them at their desks in lectures, people twice my age doing the same thing. All of them trying to do something good for their health, all of them paying for it. It stopped feeling like a wellness category and started feeling like people's money being taken.

So I went digging. I asked my professors. I read supplier documents and certificates of analysis until I understood what I was looking at. And what I found was this: most of these brands contain a fraction of the mushroom extract needed to do anything at all. Just enough to put the word on the front of the bag. The benefits get printed on the label. The dose never makes it into the product.

That was the moment it clicked. Someone had to make the honest version.

So we built it properly

3,000 mg of mushroom extract in every serving. 500 mg of each of six species, fruiting body only, hot-water extracted — real amounts, at the level the research actually uses.

And no sweeteners. Not because sweet is wrong, but because every gram of sweetener is a gram that isn't mushroom. We'd rather give that space to the thing you're paying for, and give you the choice of how it tastes. Your milk, your creamer, your sweetener, or none at all. That decision belongs to you, not to us.

Mushrooms aren't new where I'm from

In the Sherpa villages of the Himalayas, mushrooms aren't a wellness trend. They're food. They go into everyday cooking, gathered from the forests and the high slopes, and they have been part of how people eat there for as long as anyone can remember.

One of them carries more weight than the rest. Cordyceps — yarsha gumba — grows high in the Nepali mountains and is one of the most valued things anyone can find there. Families walk for days into the high meadows to search for it. It has been used for generations for stamina, endurance and recovery — the things you need when you live and work at altitude.

That's why cordyceps is in this blend at a real dose. Not because it tested well in marketing, but because where I come from, people have trusted it for a very long time.

Why Sherpa

The name came from home. I grew up in a Sherpa family, and I watched relatives stay strong and well into old age on nothing more than how they ate and how they lived — real food, hard work, thin air, long walks. The Sherpa name is known around the world for endurance, for strength, for calm under pressure, and for carrying other people higher when the air runs out.

But somewhere along the way I stopped thinking of Sherpa as only a people. It's a quality, and it lives in everyone. It's the part of you that keeps going after the point where stopping would be reasonable. The part that shows up on the hard mornings. The resilience that gets you up whatever mountain you happen to be climbing — a degree, a career, a hard year, a body you're trying to look after.

Everyone has a summit. Everyone already has what it takes to reach it. Most of us have simply never been asked to use it.

That's what this coffee is for. Wake the Sherpa within you.

Thank you for reading, and for giving us a try.