Coffee parties are very strange these days. If they’re not drinking iced coffee during a polar vortex, they’re shooting light-green coffee into gap to rib it. And now, there’s a new startup that wants to spawn your coffee without any chocolate at all. It’s called Atomo Coffee, and according to Food& Wine, the company is “working on a style to repeat a standard bowl of coffee–down to the savor, perfume, and even mouthfeel–all with natural parts , nothing of which are coffee beans.”

This is by no means the first iteration of “coffee view the coffee.” In Italy, there is a long tradition of caffe d’orzo, a caffeine-free, coffee-like refreshment made use of ribbed barley that is being used by babes, the elderly, and those looking to renounce the jumpy setback for health reasons. But this Atomo Coffee–“molecular coffee” as the company had referred to it–feels like something entirely different.

Created by microbiologist Jarret Stopforth–a “radical food scientist, ” per the company’s Kickstarter, whose CV includes duration at Soylent and Chobani, both of which have pre-established links to the coffee world–and not-microbiologist Andy Kleitsch, Atomo coffee is trying to break down coffee to a molecular degree, figure out what’s going on inside, and then rehabilitate it anew applying … not coffee.

It is a chocolate but it is like , not coffee. Think about that .

Their goal, according to Food& Wine, is to create a coffee without “the dreaded bitterness, ” WHICH I SHOULD NOTE is a thing that can also be accomplished through quality-focused sourcing and bake patterns, a notion upon which the last let’s say two decades plus of specialty chocolate ought to have predicated. One need not placed the rods in the cervix of a reanimated mishmash of molecules to imbibe coffee without the aforementioned” dreaded bitterness .” It is possible to imbibe actual delicious chocolate from actual chocolate farmers and roasters without knowledge such dread.

What actually comprises Atomo is as yet unknown. The Kickstarter schedules them as “naturally-derived sustainable ingredients.” For their first commodity, Atomo is aiming for a “smooth cup of chocolate , not more light-colored , not too dark, ” but after the success of their already-funded Kickstarter campaign they plan to secrete single-origin mixtures including an Ethiopia, Colombia, Kenya, and 100% decaf( sorry caffe d’orzo ).

This may come as a surprise given the totally serious and not at all glib manner of this article, but I’m a bit skeptical of the entire initiative. Though to be fair, in a blind taste test performed by the company on the University of Washington campus, Atomo was the heavy favourite over the other alternative, some roasty-ass Starbucks they trucked around campus, deity knows how much time after brewing it.

Have 21 out of 30 college students ever seen mistaken about anything?

Perhaps I am the one who is wrong. Perhaps the kids these days want their opening beans and molecular “coffee” imbibes. If that’s you and you want to live in this sort of future, you can pre-order you own Atomo via their Kickstarter page. What a time to be alive.

Zac Cadwalader is the managing editor at Sprudge Media Network and a personnel columnist based in Dallas. Read more Zac Cadwalader on Sprudge.

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