Recaf

Pictured: Coffee, which recaf might taste like if you take away the "came out of a factory and spent 20 years in a cargo ship" factor

It's fucking coffee. Why are you even on this page? Did you expect it to be something else? A hot cup of recaf. Coffee. WARHAMMER 40k coffee. Thanks for visiting this page. Good job wasting time.

Contents may include grimderp

Since it's called re-caf, which is a reference to the term de-caf, which means de-caffeinated, chances are this term is supposed to mean re-caffeinated, as in at one point this sludge didn't have caffeine in it, implying it's some derivative of a concentrate of a chemical substitute of an imitation of coffee. The way the grimness of the 41st millennium works it's probably not too far fetched to assume that recaf tastes like the stuff they claim to be coffee in the discount bargain section of Lidl or Aldi (or Walmart for Amerifriends) and if you'd actually brew a mug of real coffee from real coffee beans in 40k and hand it out to people, a Commissar would home in on your position immediately and execute you for attempting to induce Slaaneshi heresy over these delicious cups of brown liquid.

Not coffee?

Some say that recaf is in fact tea. Others consider it an umbrella term that includes tea, coffee and any other liquid sleep substitute. It is worth noting that some drinks in canon are explicitly referred to as a type of "tea" (such as Tanna). Space Marines drink their tea in fine china cups.

The precise definition of recaf is in fact: "a popular hot beverage, made from crushed and brewed leaves. The composition can vary from planet to planet, but most blends have a stimulant such as caffeine as a basic release agent."

How to make your own Recaf

Oddly enough, there's actually a rather simple way to make your own Recaf for consumption, as put forth by the holy author Dan Abnett. Here's how it goes:

• Brew a pot of tea
• Empty the water out of your coffee maker
• Dump the tea in the coffee maker reservoir
• Brew coffee, using tea instead of water
• Enjoy your AIDS.

The end result of this is that you end up with a super-caffeinated beverage, combining the two limbs of the evolutionary tree that both produce caffeine. Recaf ends up tasting somehow like both, and yet neither at the same time. Regardless of which one you think, it will still unfortunately make all coffee you make from now on taste suspiciously like tea.

In all seriousness

Considering the tea plants and coffee shrubs of Holy Terra are all dead, recaf is technically not coffee or tea but a culinary equivalent. Imagine an agri-worlder working for just above minimum wage armed with either a machete or a tractor to work 12 hour shifts to fill cheap buckets with beans. After a wash to get rid of some of the bugs they get hauled into a cargo ship to send them over to some food-based forge world. By now after traveling through space and the Warp for months on end these beans have certainly lost whatever caffeine they might have ever had, so some synthetic caffeine gets injected into the slurry after they get ground up. This mash gets shoved into cheap plastic bags. These bags are put in another stasis field for however long it takes them to get shipped to another world so they can be sorted and loaded into more cargo ships, rationed out to the Imperial Guard and the rich civilians, who won't know how far and how long these acrid beans soaked in nutritional chemicals had to travel and through what labyrinthine machines of industry because it's 7 in the morning and they just want something to help them crawl out of bed.

That's recaf.