"Sleep is a crutch"

When I was at RMC, a senior named Hedrick used to triple brew his coffee - that is, pour brewed coffee into the water reservoir and brew it through fresh grounds...twice. He did that because he was a FAMER, which was some weird acronym for Chem Eng, and because he liked the rep that went with triple-brewed sludge in his thermos.

Well, thanks to a tip from the good folks at Op-For, Hedrick - wherever he is these days - now has a way of getting his caffeine fix without destroying a coffee-maker every couple of months. It's called Ranger Coffee:

A few years ago, it dawned on Zach Thomas that coffee didn't have enough caffeine. At the time, he was pulling all-nighters as a student at the United States Military Academy at West Point. By the time he became an instructor at the U.S. Army Ranger School in Fort Benning, Ga., he lived by a common saying at his school: "Sleep is a crutch." "I used to just drink a pot of coffee, but then you have to go to the bathroom 100 times during the day. If you could just get more caffeine in one cup, then that would be the best of both worlds," he says. In 2005 Thomas, now 30, founded Ranger Coffee, with a "hypercaffeinated" blend that contains double the caffeine of regular coffee, or about 300 milligrams per 12-ounce serving—the equivalent of six Diet Cokes. The small, Rockmart, Ga.-based company sells 1,700 bags of coffee a year, nearly half of them to troops stationed in Iraq.

This java actually uses the caffeine that's removed from decaffeinated coffee, spraying it on to Ranger Coffee to boost your juice-factor - apparently without compromising on taste, if the company's promo material is to be believed. And I ask: would a Ranger lie to you?

Liquid obsidian gold, ladies and gents.