International-travelling dopers. Please explain American antipathy to instant coffee

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
21

Yeah, the thing is that instant coffee just isn’t any faster or more convenient than a drip coffee maker. For a drip coffee maker you dump in a filter, dump in grounds, pour water in the top, and hit the “on” switch. 3 minutes later coffee’s ready.

For instant coffee you fill up the kettle, put it on the stove, heat up the water, spoon crystals into the cup, pour hot water in, and stir. It takes the same amount of time to boil water on the stove.

I suppose if you’re not a regular coffee drinker and don’t have a coffee maker, instant might look easier. But a french press is just as easy…boil water, dump coarse grounds into the french press, wait a bit, and press down. It takes a bit longer with one extra waiting step, but it’s just as easy.

Since the quality difference is quite noticable, and instant coffee isn’t any cheaper or easier than drip coffee, instant is looked down on. Even people who don’t drink coffee at home will usually have a coffee maker for company. I suppose if you live in a country where no one expects you to serve them coffee, ever, you might not have a coffee maker, and if you never drink real coffee anyway you don’t develop a taste for it. I know I never drank coffee until my 30s, I disliked it but started developing a taste for it slowly. I still like it with milk, but now I actively enjoy the taste.

22

Ugh. I hereby retract my offer to try the instant coffee if I visit the UK.

23

Starbucks isn’t even the most popular coffee in Seattle anymore—I believe Tully’s has passed them. And neither one of them is within lightyears of Seattle’s best coffee, Vivace. Nevertheless, anti-Starbucks rants are mostly hyperbole. Sure, it’s far from the best espresso, and its corporate character is at the very least annoying, but their coffee is hardly as bad as most Starbucks-haters would have one believe.

24

And it’s way better than instant.

25

For sure. And I’m sure that if Americans associated tea with some kind of instant-coffee analogue, most English would be analogously horrified. BTW, I’m a tea-lover.

26

I don’t mind instant coffee as long as it’s in a cafe con leche like the ones I used to get in Chile. When it was delivered to you, the milk and coffee would be separated in the same glass - high-fat creamy milk on the top and incredibly thick instant coffee on the bottom. Pour in a bunch of sugar and swirl the two together. I’m sure it’s really simple, but I never figured out how they would pour the milk in to sit on top. I imagine it’s like building a black and tan. Either way, it was absolutely fantastic!

Anyway (sorry - wiping drool off my keyboard), I’ve never been a fan of instant coffee by itself. I’m not a coffee snob, but I really prefer brewed over instant, though instant will work in a pinch.

27

I’ll agree on Vivace… Cafe D’arte and Caffe Ladro are good as well. Oddly, I’ve never been in a Tully’s. Starbucks’ espresso has (had?) a great carmelly flavour in milk drinks which I enjoyed in a double short latte. I used to be a fan, it’s the pushbutton espresso and pre-packaged baked goods that killed it for me; I feel they lost a lot of what made them good when they went that route. I think Howard Schultz summed it up best this past February; link. When “my” Starbucks went to the pushbutton vending machine, I found a local espresso joint. Which actually worked out better or worse, depending on your perspective - the owner is a wicked good baker. :slight_smile: Sorry for the hijack… discussion of coffee gets me going. Maybe it helps illustrate one answer to the OP’s question; we can take our coffee (too) seriously sometimes. Instant coffee is to me what Lipton instant is to PG Tips.

28

I don’t know. On the shelves I see Folgers and I see Taster’s Choice, with both red labels and green labels (I assume the green label is decaf). And there is a store brand. And the specialized international flavors coffees. Someone is buying these, or this store wouldn’t devote any shelf space to it at all.

I once ended up as the only coffee drinker in the office, and I went with instant rather than make, and drink, a full pot several times a day. One pot would last the day in terms of quantity, but as to quality, it would burn. I just don’t drink that much. I found the instant to be about the same, taste-wise, as the brewed stuff that had been sitting on the burner for three hours, and much less annoying to my coworkers.

29

I suppose it must be the same as what’s going on elsewhere in a thread about Hershey bars. Of course I could never mistake instant coffee for the same thing - they’re different, but they’re both palatable drinks to me (albeit one more than the other), but because they’re both palatable, the practical difference seems to me less significant than it obviously does to Americans.

As with the chocolate thing, but in reverse; the difference between Hershey chocolate and European brands is probably quite small (in terms of anything that can be measured), but the difference sits right astride a watershed that makes one fall on the side of lovely and the other on the side of horrible.

30

I drink coffee occasionally as a special treat (caffeine gives me the jitters easily), so I like instant for recipes like my mom’s chocolate pound cake or Tiramisu, that require small amounts of coffee. It doesn’t make sense to make a whole pot just to use 1/4 cup.

In our household we prefer Caribou to Starbucks. To me, Starbucks always tastes burned, like they over-roast their beans. Caribou’s Obsidian blend is our current addiction - it makes a great iced coffee with sweetened condensed milk.

31

I think it’s due to several factors:
[ul]
[li]US versus UK culture[/li][li]Changing times[/li][li]Demographics of the typical Doper[/li][/ul]

US versus UK culture

We’re a nation of coffee drinkers, so we’re probably more snobbish about coffee than people in the UK. I don’t know for sure. I’ve been to the UK on business many times and never noticed a marked affinity for instant coffee, but I wasn’t eating in people’s houses. On the other hand, I did notice that bistros/cafes/etc barely knew what espresso was, and were clueless about lattes (at least in the late 1980s).

Changing times
In my far-past youth, instant coffee was a lot more popular in the US, and people weren’t real coffee snobs. My parents routinely made coffee in a percolator, which is just about the worst way to make it, kinda like making tea by dumping the leaves into a kettle of cold water and then boiling them for a half hour or so. About the time I left for college, my parents started drinking drip coffee; my mom was turned on to it in her chemistry lab where they used filter paper and funnels to make it!

Nowadays, you’d be hard-pressed to find a percolator for sale, while Mr. Coffee has paved the way for the standard electric drip maker.

The Doper Sample

We can’t base US coffee tastes on the typical Doper. We are, after all, talking about people who not only ** know how ** to use computers, but spend their time doing it! I suspect Dopers have way above-average intelligence, sophistication, and “early adopter” mentality.

32

Can you elaborate on how Starbucks doesn’t really make espresso?

33

Bucking the trend a little here, the only time that I was offered a coffee at someone’s house in the UK and served :eek: instant, the host in question was… Canadian.
Of course, I’m talking post-1990. Before that, instant was more or less the default.

34

I don’t know whether anyone has mentioned it, but I prefer brewed coffee to instant for the buzz factor. You can google to find the amounts of caffeine in brewed or instant coffees.

35

I don’t think their being Canadian had much to do with it; we pretty much kept pace with the US when it came to becoming coffee snobs. That canuck was probably just one of the sorry few who liked instant. :slight_smile:

There really is a marked difference between instant and brewed, though. Instant always tasted grainy. Not like it had coffee grounds in it, but like actual grain – and not just the stuff with chicory. It also tasted markedly different, like that whole freeze-drying process imparted a certain freezer-burned flavour to it.

Perhaps it’s like the difference between coffee from a tin and freshly ground coffee. Coffee from a tin is alright, makes a perfectly palatable cuppa joe. Set beside a coffee made from beans you freshly ground yourself however and there’s absolutely no comparison. The fresh ground stuff tastes fresh ground – unmistakably so. If fresh ground is a huge improvement over canned, then canned is a huge improvement over instant. Thus, those who prefer fresh ground would find the instant stuff vile.

36

Sorry for any confusion; that was meant as a reference specifically to the “baristas” and the fact they don’t do anything more than push a button on a vending machine in many locations now. What they get out of the machines may be espresso, but it isn’t the employees making it. Meaning: they no longer fill the portafilter, tamp the puck, and draw the shots themselves. Pushing a button = “making” espresso to me. It’s sort of like the difference between McDonald’s vending machine milkshakes and real old-fashioned icecream blended milkshakes.

37

I don’t think their espresso is all that good. In their defense, they do make espresso and other “real” coffee drinks on demand, it’s just that not many people demand them.

Furthermore, really really good espresso is tricky to make. The grind, the tamp, and the pull have to be just right or it comes out bitter. The grind depends a lot on the humidity, and baristas in a good shop will adjust the grinder several times a day.

If the tamp is too hard the steam has a hard time going through, and you get a weak, overcooked mess. If the tamp is too soft, you get watery espresso.

The pull should be about 30 seconds, no more and no less. Too much and you overcook, too little and you miss the flavor.

A really good espresso has a crema “head” on it. It also has a unique taste, with a good deal of sweetness and tang to it. Hard to describe, except that you won’t say it’s bitter. It will taste really tart, and have a bright flavor. You can get the same effect by carbonating water; in fact, what you should taste is a great deal of natural carbonation!

Doing milk is even trickier.

So, to get really world-class espresso Starbucks would have to pay their baristas a lot more and get rid of the ones who couldn’t make it. Instead of getting the best in the class, you’re getting halfway decent. If that’s not enough for you, patronize your local “true” barista; they are out there.

Not everyone can; a friend of mine pointed out that Starbucks coming to Modesto, CA was a big event! When all you have is bars playing country music, a place to hang out with people who actually read is pretty nice!

38

Har har. :wink:

39

Considering your user name, did you ask for seconds?

40

I’m an American living in Britain. I used to drink coffee, lots of it, but always fresh brewed. Then I moved overseas and at work all I could get was instant. Figuring it was better than nothing I drank it. Then I started having serious stomach issues. Like 24/7 sour stomach and other TMI stuff. Figuring it was diet-related I started cutting out various things, including the usual suspects like dairy. No result until I switched from coffee to tea, at which point my stomach issues stopped. I have the odd cup of coffee now and then, but only when I know it’s not going to be instant.

Instant is evil.