London Nootropics Coffee Review: Flow, Zen and Mojo Compared

London Nootropics coffee is a range of UK-made instant coffee sachets, each blended with one or two named plant or mushroom extracts at modest doses: lion's mane and rhodiola in Flow, L-theanine and ashwagandha in Zen, cordyceps and Siberian ginseng in Mojo. Every sachet carries 80 to 110 mg of caffeine, and a cup costs from £0.67 to £1.25.

Its real strength is transparency: each extract is named by supplier or brand (Hifas da Terra, Rhodiolife, KSM-66) with its milligrams and standardisation, which is more than many UK mushroom coffees print. The trade-off is in the numbers: small extract doses and the caffeine of a normal cup of coffee.

We compared the brand's product pages, FAQ and prices on 29 September 2026. We have not drunk it: this is an analysis of labels, prices and public reviews. The brand says it launched in March 2020, and its product pages describe the sachets as vegan and made in the UK.

Each sachet is soluble coffee with 6% finely ground roasted coffee, a natural flavouring (a plant extract, the brand says) and two active extracts. Here are the milligrams London Nootropics gives in its product-page FAQ.

Two details are worth knowing. First, the brand's pages do not all agree: the Flow product page gives 45% beta-glucans for the lion's mane, the subscription FAQ 42% and the About page 25% for an 8:1 extract, and one older answer in the product Q&A quotes 466 mg of lion's mane. We use the product page and current FAQ: 250 mg. Second, Mush Love, made with Fantastic Fungi (the team behind the Netflix documentary, the brand says), is a limited edition that London Nootropics says it is "reviewing" extending.

How do these doses compare? The trial most often quoted for lion's mane (Docherty, 2023) used 1.8 g a day, about seven times the 250 mg in Flow. A 60-day ashwagandha trial (Lopresti, 2019) used 240 mg a day of a different extract (Shoden), about twice the 110 mg in Zen. A cordyceps sinensis trial (Chen, 2010) used 333 mg three times a day, about three times the 305 mg in one Mojo sachet. None of these studies tested a coffee sachet, and none tells you what one does.

London Nootropics coffee contains 80 to 110 mg of caffeine per sachet, according to the brand's FAQ, which describes that as "about the same as one regular cup of coffee". That applies to all the blends, Zen included, even though the brand says Zen is popular with people sensitive to caffeine.

For scale, the NHS puts a mug of instant coffee at about 100 mg and a mug of tea at about 75 mg. It advises no more than 200 mg of caffeine a day in pregnancy and while breastfeeding, so two sachets (160 to 220 mg) can reach that limit on their own. The brand suggests one or two sachets a day, each in about 300 ml of hot water.

Zen pairs its caffeine with 153 mg of L-theanine. The best-known lab study of that pairing (Owen, 2008, run by Unilever) gave 27 people 50 mg of caffeine with or without 100 mg of L-theanine and measured computer tasks over 90 minutes. The doses differ from a Zen sachet, and the study says nothing about a daily coffee.

Compared with the mushroom coffees in our top 5, London Nootropics sits at the top of the caffeine range, with Spacegoods' Coffee flavour (80 to 120 mg). Brainstoorm has 20 mg per cup and Clearly Not Coffee Original 8 mg. If you want less caffeine than a normal coffee, see our guide to coffee alternatives and their caffeine per cup.

Flow, Zen, Mojo and Mush Love all cost the same, so price per cup depends only on the box size and whether you subscribe. These are the prices on londonnootropics.com on 29 September 2026.

On a one-off 60-sachet box, a cup costs £1.00, a little less than Brainstoorm's £1.27. Per milligram of lion's mane the picture flips: Flow gives about 250 mg per pound, Brainstoorm about 790 mg. Delivery in the UK is free over £30, and free on subscriptions.

The subscription can be adjusted, skipped or cancelled from an online dashboard, according to the brand, and renewals come in refill packaging. Subscribers also collect rewards at set renewals, from a taster pack to a hoodie. One practical point from the brand's own Q&A: the sachets are not recyclable, because of an aluminium inner lining.

The brand's own shop has the full range and every box size. Elsewhere, here is what we could confirm on 29 September 2026:

• Holland & Barrett: its website listed London Nootropics Adaptogenic Mush Love Coffee, 12 sachets, at £15.00, the same price as the brand's shop.
• Harrods and Selfridges: the brand's timeline says it launched in both in 2022, and both appeared in Google results. We did not check their prices.
• Amazon and Healf: London Nootropics listings showed in Google results. Marketplace prices change often, so compare with the price per sachet above, and check that the box is sold by the brand or a known retailer.

Buying direct is the only way to get every box size and the subscription. The brand's product pages also offer international shipping.

The brand's retail page gives £15 as the shelf price of a 12-sachet box, and the "Where to find us" section of its About page shows the logos of Selfridges, Harrods and Fenwick, plus hotel groups such as Six Senses and Soneva.

London Nootropics appeared on Dragons' Den in 2022, according to the timeline on the brand's About page, which adds a figure of 4 million viewers. We could not confirm from an official source which Dragons, if any, made an offer, or whether a deal was completed after filming, so we are not going to repeat the versions that circulate online.

The same timeline sketches the rest of the story: it dates the founders' discovery of adaptogens to 2017, the launch of the coffees to 2020 and a production scale-up to 2021 ("no more hand-filling sachets"). In 2022 came a pop-up coffee bar in Piccadilly Circus and the arrival at Harrods and Selfridges.

None of this changes what is in the sachet, which is why we judge the product on its label.

Most of the review numbers come from the brand's own site. On 29 September 2026, the Flow page showed an average of 4.76 out of 5 from 750 reviews and the Mush Love page 4.87 from 321, while the About page claims more than 12,170 reviews in total. Holland & Barrett's listing for Mush Love showed three reviews, all at 5 out of 5. We could not read Trustpilot's figures, as the site blocks automated checks.

What comes up most is taste: the review widget's own summary says 41% of the topics raised on Flow are about it, mostly positive. The brand itself says its blends taste like regular coffee, with a possible slight earthiness. Packaging, delivery and handwritten notes also come up. When the highlighted reviews mention a downside, it is the price, and a buyer asking about recyclable sachets was told they are not.

We leave out what reviewers say about how the coffee makes them feel. No health claim for lion's mane or ashwagandha is authorised in Great Britain, and one person's morning is not evidence.

Our top 5 only lists partner brands, and links to shops on this site are affiliate links. But the numbers also explain why Flow would not make our list: it has a quarter of the lion's mane of our No. 1, four to five times the caffeine, and no other mushroom.

None of that makes Flow a bad coffee. It is cheaper per cup, its extracts are named and standardised, and the brand describes a taste close to regular coffee. But if you are paying for lion's mane, Brainstoorm puts 1,000 mg in every cup, alongside cordyceps and chaga, with 6,225 mg of declared actives, the most complete formula in our top 5. It is the No. 1 in our UK mushroom coffee ranking.

Choose Flow if you want a full-strength instant coffee with a small, clearly labelled lion's mane extract, in single sachets you can carry around. Choose a dedicated lion's mane coffee if the milligrams matter more to you than the caffeine: the 1,000 mg blends give four times the lion's mane per cup, most of them with less caffeine.

Our guide to how much lion's mane is really in each UK coffee compares ten brands, milligram by milligram, with the price per cup. For the bigger picture on the category, read what mushroom coffee is and what the research shows.

• You drink several coffees a day: each Flow sachet counts as a full coffee for caffeine, so it replaces a cup rather than adding a gentler one.
• You want to try before committing: the £5.00 Taster Pack or a 12-sachet box costs less than any 30-serving pouch.
• You want lion's mane with other mushrooms: Mush Love adds cordyceps and chaga, at 160 mg each, while a 1,000 mg blend such as Brainstoorm gives cordyceps and chaga at 1,000 mg each.

Is London Nootropics coffee good?

It depends on what you want from it. The sachets name each extract and its dose, cost £0.67 to £1.25 a cup, and score 4.76 out of 5 for Flow on the brand's own site, mostly for taste. The doses are small, though: 250 mg of lion's mane in Flow against 1,000 mg in our No. 1, with 80 to 110 mg of caffeine in every blend.

Does nootropic coffee work?

No study has tested a nootropic coffee as sold, so nobody can say. "Nootropic" is a marketing word with no regulatory definition, and in Great Britain a food may only carry health claims listed as authorised on the GB register. None is authorised for lion's mane or ashwagandha. The trials on these ingredients were small and used different doses.

Are nootropics legal in the UK?

London Nootropics' sachets are sold openly as foods, including by Holland & Barrett. The word "nootropic" has no legal definition; what the rules control is claims, which must appear on the GB register as authorised. For ashwagandha, used in Zen, the Food Standards Agency passed the evidence it gathered to the Committee on Toxicity and had published no final opinion by 29 September 2026.

How much caffeine is in London Nootropics coffee?

Between 80 and 110 mg per sachet, according to the brand, the same for Flow, Zen, Mojo and Mush Love. That is close to the NHS figure of about 100 mg for a mug of instant coffee. Two sachets can reach 220 mg, above the NHS limit of 200 mg a day in pregnancy and while breastfeeding.