Can you mix creatine with coffee?
Yes. The early creatine trials, including the ones that set the usual dose, gave it dissolved in hot tea. Warm liquid dissolves it faster, and that doesn’t change how much your muscles take up. Drink it soon after you mix it, since creatine slowly breaks down once it’s dissolved, faster in hot or acidic drinks.
There are two worries here, and they often get mixed together. One is that heat destroys creatine, so hot coffee turns your scoop into nothing. The other is that caffeine cancels creatine out. Both have a grain of truth in them, and neither should stop your morning coffee.
What we’d do
Stir your scoop into your morning coffee and drink it while it’s warm, the same as you’d drink the coffee anyway. Don’t mix a batch the night before. If you’re loading for a week and drink a lot of coffee, keep the coffee to your usual cup or two that week, or skip loading.
Heat helps it dissolve
Creatine monohydrate doesn’t dissolve easily. A 2021 review of creatine questions gives about 14 g per liter of water at room temperature, so a 5 g scoop needs about 12 oz (360 mL) of cool water to fully dissolve. Hot water dissolves it faster, which is the reason the early studies, the 1996 Hultman trial among them, gave creatine in hot tea. The review adds that how well it dissolves “has no influence on tissue uptake.”
It’s like stirring sugar into hot tea against iced tea. It vanishes faster in the hot one, and it’s the same sugar.
Heat and time break it down
The catch is time. Dry powder is very stable and shows no sign of breaking down over years, even stored warm. Once it’s dissolved, creatine slowly turns into creatinine, faster at higher temperatures and in more acidic drinks. Coffee is both hot and a little acidic. Drinking it within a few minutes is fine. Leaving it in a thermos all morning, or mixing a week of creatine drinks ahead of time, is how you lose some.
Does caffeine cancel creatine?
Mostly no. Two reviews, in 2022 and 2023, each looked at ten studies that combined the two.
| Situation | What the studies found |
|---|---|
| Caffeine about an hour before a test, after creatine loading | Added to creatine in 3 of 5 studies |
| Creatine loading, then a single pre-workout caffeine dose | Loading didn’t blunt the caffeine |
| Caffeine every day during the loading week | 2 studies found interference, 3 found none, 1 found a boost |
Most of those studies used large caffeine doses, about 5 to 7 mg per kg, which is two or three strong coffees for a 176 lb (80 kg) person. The 2022 review’s authors concluded that daily caffeine during loading “could interfere”. They suggested it might be because the two have opposite effects on how fast muscle relaxes, or because together they upset the stomach.
The only place coffee might get in the way is a loading week with a lot of caffeine every day. On 3 to 5 g a day, with your normal coffee, there’s no study showing a problem. caffeine.guide has how much caffeine is in your cup and the coffee myth has the longer story.
4 sources
- Antonio J and others, Common questions and misconceptions about creatine supplementation: what does the scientific evidence really show?, JISSN, 2021pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Elosegui S and others, Interaction between caffeine and creatine when used as concurrent ergogenic supplements: a systematic review, International Journal of Sport Nutrition and Exercise Metabolism, 2022pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Marinho AH and others, Effects of creatine and caffeine ingestion in combination on exercise performance: a systematic review, Critical Reviews in Food Science and Nutrition, 2023pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Hultman E and others, Muscle creatine loading in men, J Appl Physiol, 1996pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
