Word: flavorings
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Instant coffee makes me sad. This is not a judgment on its flavor. It is because, in my personal experience, the drinking of instant coffee is a surefire indicator that the circumstances of my life have gone badly wrong. It is the taste of a grimy breakroom at a dead-end job. The grudging cup offered by a non-coffee-drinker during an unhappy visit. The weekend I spent in a dingy Iowa motel when my car broke down the first day I arrived in town for a newspaper internship...
According to Starbucks, the difference in Via instant is that, in addition to dehydrating a brewed reduction of coffee, it adds microground beans to add flavor and body to the finished product. It's meant to taste more like the cup you'd buy - and at $2.95 a three-pack, it had better. (My Folgers was $5.99 for a 60-cup jar, even at the usurious prices of a Brooklyn bodega.) The resulting coffee dust (more like espresso than the usual crystals) comes packaged in a sort of coffee Pixie Stix, premeasured. (See the top 10 food trends...
...brewed coffee, and not the coffee from Starbucks: my store-bought cup had a richer, winier mouthfeel, as does my Costco homebrew. At the recommended eight-ounce dose of water, the Italian tasted a little weak, but smooth. To my surprise, the Colombian actually had a rounder, more satisfying flavor, though I usually prefer a darker roast. (Both types of Via tasted better when the water had a minute to cool.) I wouldn't replace my home-brewed with it, but if my sister-in-law served it to me, it would not strain family relations; it might have made...
Maybe I was just remembering the flavor of old-fashioned instant coffee wrong? Nope. I took a sip of the Folgers - oh, sweet Jesus, it was worse than I remembered: like an evil madeleine, tasting of ground plastic and pencil leads and unwise life choices. (See 10 big recession surprises...
...historic Harvard-Yale rivalry adds flavor to the matchup. While not as heated as in football, the game still means a lot to the players, especially due to the fact that the two schools recruit from the same pool of high school players...