IHMO…Americans make a decent cup of neither. I couldn’t stand the coffee in New York, just gallons of weak dishwater. Like other above, I can’t take even a sip of instant without being repulsed, and the huge cups on offer in America are little better. I like it STRONG. And the same with tea.
This has changed, to an extent. I agree with other posts, that decent espressos are not made by pressing a button. The first thing I do when I arrive in Italy is always to get a coffee. That’s before even a toilet stop after eight solid hours on a coach.
Now this is a far more mundane, and far more logical, explanation. Especially that the move to better coffee in Britain generally does not involve filters, but cafetieres. This means the basic method of boiling the kettle remains the same (and that tea & coffee can easily be made at the same time with little extra hassle, a crucial factor).
Cafetiere coffee is always lukewarm by the time it’s ready, though. Sainsburys do pretty good “suspend in the cup” filter coffee. I know you can get teabag-like coffee bags, and contraptions you balance on top of the cup to make filter coffee, from any supermarket chain, but those Sainsbury things make better coffee and require less faffing around. I have not seen their equivalent in any other shop here.
(I am not affiliated etc. etc.)
I might have missed it in skimming over this, but I wanted to add:
As noted, most Americans have coffeemakers, but not only that, what 99% of the coffee drinking population has are drip coffeemakers. They’re simple to use, deliver consistently good coffee every time, and are a snap to clean. A generation or two ago what most people had were percolators, which were hard to clean, tricky to use, and, as regards coffee quality, were flawed in their very design. So percolated coffee wasn’t that much better than instant, anyway. You could pour it into a fine china cup and pretend it was, but it wasn’t. So it is true that more people used to drink instant coffee, and old movies and ephemera from the era certainly bear it out.
I might have missed it in skimming over this, but I wanted to add:
As noted, most Americans have coffeemakers, but not only that, what 99% of the coffee drinking population has are drip coffeemakers. They’re simple to use, deliver consistently good coffee every time, and are a snap to clean. A generation or two ago what most people had were percolators, which were hard to clean, tricky to use, and, as regards coffee quality, were flawed in their very design. So percolated coffee wasn’t that much better than instant, though, according to the commercials, you could pour it into a fine china cup and pretend that it was. So, it is true that more people used to drink instant coffee, and old movies and ephemera from the era certainly bear it out.
I like coffee, and I like instant coffee. They are different drinks, but both nice. My Saturday morning breakfast ritual is fresh croissants, orange juice, and cafetiere coffee, and I’d never substitute that for instant. But if I want a hot rink and I’ve already had about 5 cups of tea that day, then I will often have a Nescafé. Sure, it’s not coffee, but it tastes good.
I said there was a time when it was next to impossible to find anything other than instant coffee in Thailand. There WAS one alternative that has been around for years, but you really had to make an effort to get it, which involved going down to China Town, not the most convenient thing if you just need a cuppa upon waking up. But the Chinese here have always had what was called kafae thung, literally “bag coffee.” It’s real coffee filtered through this bag-type sieve, looks sort of like a miniature butterfly net. Very strong. I drink my coffee black, but it’s considered highly unusual to drink bag coffee without sweetened condensed milk; I’d always get odd looks when I insisted on it black. That was good, but very hard to find outside of China Town. I don’t think I’ve had any since drip coffee became more readily available, as I rarely make it down to China Town these days.
In my experience, office coffee, even though usually brewed here, has never met my high standards. You should do what I do here…make your own at home and bring a thermos of it to work every day.
I’m about to knock off work and stop at Whole Foods on the way home to buy some whole-bean coffee. Mmmmmmm!!
I don’t know about the UK, but one summer I lived in Germany, I had to drink instant at home because home was a hotel and all I had was a hot pot. German instant coffee is (or was, at that time - it’s been 25+ years) MUCH better than your garden variety U.S. instant.
I use a combination of instant espresso and instant decaf to make café con leche every morning (zap one mug milk, add a spoonful of instant and 1/2 spoonful of espresso), but that’s the only way I would drink instant here.
I like the teakettle/convenience theory for the UK and think Mr. Coffee’s marketing in the '70s and '80s probably moved a whole lot of Americans from instant to drip.
I’m a total coffee snob. I will use instant coffee in recipes that call for it, such as cakes or something. But drinking it? :eek: Not on your life. I have a drip coffee maker but I don’t even “lower” myself to use THAT very often. For me, it’s almost always this:
grind the coffee beans (and they have to be good beans, too)
make the espresso
steam the milk
choose one of my 15 or so flavored syrups
enjoy my yummy latte.
For me, I drink coffee for the taste. I don’t really get much of a buzz from caffeine and never have (even if I haven’t had any in months). So it’s pretty easy for me to just not drink coffee rather than drink subpar coffee.
I think you’re on to something - I used to bring instant coffee on hiking trips “to save weight”. It’s heck on the digestive system. I guess it is a caffein delivery system, but jeez.
A couple world wars really screwed the US coffee scene for a long time. Every town of any size had a coffee importer and their own blend of fresh roast. But the need for canned, vacuum packed coffee and instant varieties for military use changed consumer trends till relatively recently. It also got more expensive and ended up a weak, watery brew to keep costs down.
In the latest “Tiny Joy” home roasting newsletter:
“After all, if no one bought the low grade and mid-grade coffee, the farmer couldn’t afford the time, labor and equipment it takes.”
That makes a lot of sense. In photographs of some of the towns near coffee growing regions, instant-coffee is pretty much the order of the day. The US doesn’t grow coffee outside of Hawaii, but it is apparently the 2nd biggest import, after oil.
I think the OP has the situation bass ackwards. It’s not the antpiathy of Americans to instant coffee, but the UKs love for it. And it’s all the fault of the Peter Pan of British pop music.
Let’s have a little history lesson.
It’s WWII and Britain is, fairly obviously at war. Food (especially imported food) is in short supply and the government introduces rationing. What’s a good thing to ration? Maybe something that’s non essential, imported and takes a lot of room on ships that could be carrying something more useful. The tea ration was 2oz per week.
Of course, not everything was doom and gloom. Young ladies could find some excitement with an American serviceman. Along with their chocolates (quite possiblt Hershey’s ), soldiers had a new and exotic beverage - Maxwell House Instant Coffee. Incidentally, the first commercially available instant coffee was Nescafe introduced in both Switzerland and the UK in1938 but was AFAIK a novelty item.
After the war, tea rationing was eventually withdrawn, but new techologies and new lifestyles were being introduced. One of these was television. On the 22nd of September (the day Grace Archer was killed in a fire), Britain’s first commercial TV station, ITV, was launched. Why would this affect British drinking habits I hear you ask? A three minute ad break was not long enough to brew up a pot of tea, but it was long enough to spoon powder into hot water. Of course, the discerning viewer could also use a teabag (introduced to the UK by Tetley’s in 1953).
The 50’s also saw the invention of teens (teenagers were invented in 1941) and rock ‘n’ roll. Where did teenagers hang out in the 50’s? American teens could hang out in diners where they could drink dishwater weak drip coffe, whereas their British cousins would have make do in a coffee house which probably be owned by Nestle and they would be sold instant coffe.
Thus the great schism was created. By Cliff Richard.
That’s my opinion, anyway, besides, this post has way too many cites for MPSIMS already.
No kidding? If you mean the little packet of truly awful coffee they put next to the coffeemaker in hotel rooms, then I could see your point. I’ve never encountered hotel-room coffee that was any good, and I assume this is mainly because they want experienced travelers to spend a few bucks and order real coffee from room service.
I was thinking about this thread over the weekend–there’s your confirmation of serious Dope addiction–and came to the following realization. I’m glad that in at least this one area our American mass culture demonstrates a regard for quality. In nearly every other sphere “American” is almost synonymous with “lousy”. American cheese anyone? American beer? How about American cooking? Of course there are high quality exceptions in all of these areas…microbrewed beer, artisanal cheeses, and excellent restaurants. But the mass culture, what most of us consume and use every day, seems to be all about the bottom dollar and manifests itself in the belief that a $14 pair of jeans from Walmart really is seven times better than an $100 pair of Lucky brand, because it’s seven times cheaper. This attitude does not question whether the more expensive jeans might fit better, look better, and last longer than the cheap ones; and this attitude carries over to food productcs and other things that we use.
I was there in the early 90’s and couldn’t find anything but instant. There may be an instant coffee out there that isn’t horrible swill, but I’ve yet to find it.
“Instant coffee” is to coffee what Tang is to fresh-squeezed orange juice.
), soldiers had a new and exotic beverage - 