Some people will say anything to hawk their wares. Case in point: Limitless Coffee in Chicago, who claims to provide the “cleanest coffees” in the world. What’s the source of this belief? Is it that the flavor profiles are exacting and pronounced? Nope. According to the Chicago Tribune, it’s that they don’t use naturally processed coffees.

It all started when Limitless co-founder Matt Matros went on a yoga retreat in Bali. During that trip, Matros stopped by a coffee farm where he was “horrified” by how dirty naturally processing coffee was:

“They’re fermenting and decomposing and dying and attracting bugs, birds and wild animals,” he says. “I saw this with my own eyes. And then it might rain, and then the sun comes out, and you get mold.”

After returning to the States, Matros learned about washed processed coffees, which I guess are supposed to have fewer mycotoxins or something? I dunno. They sure sounds scary, though. Anyway, washed coffees equal clean, naturals equal dirty. Got it? Good.

He’s sold washed coffee in Brockway, Ogdenville, and North Haverbrook.

And you can’t just jam that super clean coffee into any ole roaster. That’ll get you the cancer. At Limitless, they use an air roaster. Because of the chaff and the smoke and the carcinogens and the cancer. OH GOD THE CANCER! From their website, without a single word or bit of punctuation changed:

“The significance of [air roasting] is that any and all loose chaff is immediately swept away from the beans. The chaff is unsinged. Whereas, in a drum roaster, most of the chaff rides on the tumbling beans and burns and smokes. This smoke, fumigates all other beans, giving them a harsh bitey taste. The smoke also deposits on the surface of all other beans, resulting in darker bean surfaces than interiors, and oil surfaces. This carbonization of the drum roasted chaff creates volatile products similar to those found in cigarette smoke and charcoal preparation from wood. These are classified as carcinogenic chemicals.

Fuckin’ chaff collectors, how do they work?

If none of this has convinced you to switch to Limitless Coffee for the rest of your life, don’t worry, Matros has an appeal to emotion (that emotion being fear) that’ll definitely do the trick.

“At the end of the day, if you had two cups of coffee in front of you, would you want the one with toxins in it or not?” he asks. “Maybe some people don’t care. I know some people who eat at McDonald’s, but I don’t want to.”

Unsurprisingly, some folks in the coffee industry are calling bullshit on this whole clean coffee thing. Terms like “offensive”, “hyperbole”, and “confused about science” get tossed around in the Tribune’s article, with one person stating, “I don’t think he knows what the (heck) he’s talking about.” I don’t think he said heck.

But if there’s a silver lining to this cloud, it’s that you can get a 12 ounce bag of “Geisha Super Premium Blend Roast” variety for only $19.99, so that’s pretty cool, right?

Zac Cadwalader is the news editor at Sprudge Media Network.

*all images via Frinkiac