Thread by @demiurgent

So, a weird thing happened. We haven’t been in a position to make k-cups of coffee since the start of the work from home period. No big — I’ve mostly gone with coffee or cold bubbly caffeine.

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But @wednesday got some of the single serving Maxim (Japanese) instant coffee sticks, and they were really good. So we got some more Maxim instant (the full blue bag), and as an experiment we grabbed some Taster’s Choice hazelnut, just to see how it worked out.

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We have a Zojirushi water heater (a wedding gift from @hoover_dam) so making instant coffee’s a matter of seconds. And we went i to the experiment hoping it would be... well, good enough for hot caffeine in a rush.

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And... honestly? The Taster’s Choice is... actually really good. The Maxim is better, but the domestic instant’s generally better than K-Cup brewed.

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So... somewhere in the last several years, while the industry (and my office) went all in on coffee pods or k-cups or Chemex, pour over, or aero press coffee, supermarket instant coffee way leveled up when we weren’t looking.

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Is it better than pour over or aeropress or the like? Of course not — but it’s really fast and absolutely fits the workday niche. And much of the time it is actively better than K-Cups — probably because K-Cups go stale pretty fast all told.

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And, well, the domestic stuff’s way less expensive than other single serve options.

(This feels weirdly like sponsored content. It’s not. Not even free coffee or the like. Just for the record.)

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It shouldn’t surprise me that the instant coffee industry’s gotten better over time, especially with all the ways to brew coffee o demand these days, but I admit it — I was really f’ing surprised.

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So... yeah. Instant coffee. Cheap (domestic anyway), fast, convenient, and perfectly decent coffee in the cup.

Not what I would have expected, but here we are. Nice job, @NESCAFE.

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So... I guess that means that the next experiment would be Sanka. Man, I don’t know if my 1970s self would believe it. (Was Robert Young right for all those years? Does anyone besides me even remember Robert Young? Dang.)

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Oh, in a completely different experiment, the reintroduced (and reformulated) Postum? Markedly worse than the old stuff. But then they don’t use chicory any more, so what’s the point?

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