Coffee: A Mosquito Repellent

Garlic is a natural healthy way to repel mosquitoes. There's another way to keep those pesky biters off that while it is up in the air on being healthy for you it is far better than using sprays. It is by drinking coffee. Coffee drinkers will be happy about that but they may be wondering why it hasn't worked for some of them.

In order for coffee to keep mosquitoes from biting, it has to be drunk often and you have to drink a lot of it. My dad drinks a ton of coffee but still gets bitten when he goes outside. Let's explore why.

My dad drinks what I call "weakened coffee." It's a medium strength and he adds sugar & creamer to the mix. It's similar to a watered down "soda pop" when the ice melts. A watered down "soda" doesn't have the same taste as it originally would have before the ice melted because the water from the ice dilutes the drink. This is what happens to "weakened coffee." Medium strength coffee lies in the middle of taste. It's not as strong as what it could be and when creamer & sugar are added it changes the taste further making the drink sweet almost like a candy. In fact there is a hard candy on the market that is called "Coffee Nips" that actually tastes like coffee.

To get the benefit of coffee as a mosquito repellent then the best defense is to always choose the strongest blend and drink it black. When shopping you might be tempted to choose a strength that has the word dark on the can but it isn't as strong as the full strength dark. "Maxwell house" for instance, has mild, medium, med-dark and dark blends to choose from. Med-dark coffee may be dark but its still not going to give you the optimum benefits that you'd want.

Why is drinking as much coffee as you can scarf down important to repelling mosquitoes? Coffee makes you urinate more frequently. This means that the coffee passes through your bloodstream rather quickly and won't be there to give those mosquitoes a bitter taste should they bite.