Elf Sternberg

So Now I Know How Instant Coffee Is Made... and Advertised

2020-07-30T13:44:22Z

I feel betrayed by Folger’s Coffee.

When I was a kid in the 1970s, Folgers Coffee ads were everywhere. They were inescapable. There were two thrusts to the commercials: the first touted the flavor and claimed it was better than “gourmet,” whatever the hell “gourmet coffee” in 1970 could have meant. The tagline for those was “We’ve secretly replaced these customer’s gourmet coffee with Folger’s Crystals. Let’s see what happens.”

"Today, we're secretly replacing the fine blood these patients need to live with Folger's Crystals. Let's see what happens."

The other touted the chemical composition of the ground coffee. The ads would show close-ups of a pile of coffee, artfully arranged, and inside the pile would be these little shiny, reflective flakes. As a kid, I always thought those reflective flakes were the “crystals,” and after talking to my mother, I found that everyone else in my parents’ generation thought so as well. The rest was, well, just dried coffee.

Even as a ten-year-old kid, I wanted to know: what were the crystals? What benefit did they provide? Were they an additive? An alternative chemical extraction of coffee from just drying the stuff into a chunky brown powder?

Nope. The reflective, shiny stuff was a post-production effect added by the advertiser. In the 1970s they didn’t have Photoshop or any of the equivalents; the effects were produced by sprinkling little bits of baking glitter onto the pile of ground coffee. (It was still edible and didn’t change the taste, so it was acceptable as a “food styling” technique.)

So what were “Folger’s Crystals?” It turns out, the brown powder is the crystals. (See? The crystals are still in the photo shot, so it’s not cheating, right?) Coffee that’s freeze-dried naturally forms a highly-ordered molecular aggregate that meets the chemical definition of “heterogeneous crystal.”

I looked this up after spending a week in the woods, where I had a few packets of Starbucks Via Instant, Medium Roast and another box of Mount Hagen Organic Freeze-Dried Instant Coffee, bought from my local organic co-op. The Starbucks stuff was simply awful, but the Mount Hagen was quite acceptable if there were no fresher alternatives. Starbucks Instant is actually made by the same process, it’s just re-ground after freeze-drying so the granules are made small enough to look like a powder and less like the chunky crystals that are what most people associate with “instant coffee.”

Maybe the organic coffee is a bit more expensive, but at least they don’t lie to me.

And with that in mind, I'll leave you with that rare ad, from Folgers, that told the absolute truth:

Wake up, you sleepy-head, you can sleep when you are dead!

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Bulletproof "The Mentalist" Coffee: Do Not Bother

2019-09-09T14:59:38Z

At the grocery store the other day, I saw Bulletproof "The Mentalist" Coffee on sale. So I picked it up. TL;DR: Do Not Bother.

The coffee touts itself as "especially free of mold and other contaminants," as if that were its primary selling point. That's not its primary selling point. It's primary selling point is that it's a medium-roast coffee that was extraordinarily slow-roasted.

This has two effects: first, it releases and preserves every last molecule of caffeine. High-temperature roasting tends to degrade the caffeine found in coffee beans. Americans have been taught to enjoy "dark roast" not because it's the most flavorful or the most caffeinated, but because it provides a uniform bitterness over the cheaper, soapy flavors that might be found in some cheap coffee beans. "Medium" roast coffee beans tend to have much more caffeine.

The slow-roast process is similar to sous-vide: hold the beans at a temperature that won't cause chemical degredation of the caffeine, but will also achieve the touted effect of guaranteeing that any living organic matter with the bean is also destroyed. Which is great, if that's what you want.

Second, coffee is not just bitterness and caffeine. Good coffees come with a host of oils, esters, and terpenes that strongly influence the flavor of the coffee. The long-roasting process used by Bulletproof boils these off and the result is a coffee that is simultaneously jitter-inducing even in the most caffeine-tolerant human beings, and yet also the most boring coffee yet invented. It's not "instant" coffee; that takes longer to out-gas and results in that flat, "brown" flavor that's endemic to brands like Folger's. It's just that there's nothing there to enjoy.

The nootropic "lifehacking" hacks often seem like joyless machines doing one thing: optimizing themeslves to manipulate the capitalist system. Bulletproof Coffee, especially a line named for a profession based on deceit, trickery, and sleight-of-hand, is perfect for them.

I, on the other hand, am going to toss this bag and go buy some Ethiopian or Columbian medium-roast from the local co-op.

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Now that was a bad coffee...

2018-06-09T21:13:17Z

Bad Coffee

Omaha and I, in a misplaced fit of cash savings, bought this three-pound bag of "San Francisco Bay Gourmet Coffee" from a warehouse grocer. I'm not sure if it's an in-store brand or what; I'm not even going to google for it. I'm just going to warn you: don't buy this stuff.

If the cost of replacing your grinder is higher than replacing your stomach lining or your self-respect, then maybe you want to buy this coffee. It's double-roasted to soften the beans and make your grinder last longer. It's incredibly acidic, it smells like cheap supermarket coffee from the 1970s, and it has no personality whatsoever. Fancy creamers and high-quality turbinado cannot save it.

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