I find that coffee wakes me up way better than energy drinks, even when there is more caffeine in the energy drink, and the effects also seem to last longer. Is that a thing people can experience? Or is something wrong with me and/or I’m imagining it?
Chemistry is a hell of a lot more complex than people will tell you it is when they are concocting things for human consumption.
The stuff in coffee includes a lot more than caffeine. And even if caffeine was the only molecule at issue, the synthesized/extracted caffeine in the energy drinks is guaranteed to have impurities and imperfections in it. It’s just not going to be as good qualitatively as the molecules before they’ve gone through that process. It’ll just be up to 95% or 99% or whatever and then they’ll call it good, leaving whatever byproducts or altered molecules to wander into your system alongside the main stuff. And even if they didn’t, the energy drink would include guaranteed a whole bunch of other crap alongside just the caffeine, some of which might depress your system or produce any one of a wild array of other effects. And even if it didn’t, humans are psychological creatures, so the pure taste and experience of drinking the coffee can produce a physiological effect even if the chemistry was 100% identical which it is not.
TL;DR Yes