Nescafe Cappuccino Coffee

For someone who usually takes their coffee black, I'm surprisingly fond of a decent cappuccino. Indeed, if I'm ever in a coffee shop, I'll always choose that over an Americano and in New York last year, I drank nothing but cappuccinos for three days.

But a cappuccino has always been a "special" drink for me. The kind of drink that you only have if you're out somewhere. As an accompaniment to an Italian meal, or something to sit in a cafe drinking, ideally on a summer's day, and ideally while reading a good book. It's best with an intellectual kind of pursuit.

The problem is, and always has been, that it's tough to drink a cappuccino at home without fancy cappuccino making equipment. You can't have a decent home made cappuccino with just a kettle and hot water, as instant cappuccinos just aren't up to scratch. But when Nescafe had an offer on recently where you could get 5 cappuccino sachets free with a 300g jar of Nescafe, I thought I'd give it another try. After all, the picture on the box looked like a fairly decent cappuccino and, if they didn't turn out to be any good, the price was right!

The sachets are quite a decent size, although this isn't really a surprise, given that a cappuccino would normally be served in a larger cup than a normal coffee. With the combination of coffee and whitener (and sugar in the standard sweetened version), you get roughly the equivalent to two teaspoons of powder.

Tearing open the sachet, anyone expecting to be able to savour the rich aroma of coffee as you can even on opening a jar of instant, is going to be sorely disappointed. There's not much of a smell, and what there is seems to have an almost vanilla-like edge to it. I suspect this is the whitener. The same is true once the water has been added - if you didn't know that what you'd made contained coffee, you'd never guess.

This is where the problems that make the perfect instant cappuccino difficult to find really start. The top of a cappuccino is usually white and fluffy because the milk used has been steamed and whipped. In an instant cappuccino, you're not even starting with proper milk, and the best you can do is to stir vigorously. And what you get on the top of your coffee is a fairly solid looking froth. Sure, there's a few bubbles in it, but it doesn't even look close to the appearance of the steamed milk topping of a cappuccino - it's beige rather than white, for a start!

Of course, for a consumable, the most important thing is the taste test. And here, Nescafe Cappuccino fails again. The froth is quite heavy, and has a slightly powdery taste to it, no matter how much you've stirred the drink beforehand. Once you're through that, what you have is a cup of white coffee. The froth attaches itself to the side of the mug quite quickly and with that gone, there's no difference between this and a normal coffee with milk, apart from the powdery aftertaste from the froth, which seems to hang around long afterwards,

The other gripe would be with the sweetener. You can ask a lot of different people how they take their coffee, and get a lot of different answers. Even those of us who take sugar will take different amounts. So, in adding sweetener to try and appeal to more people, a lot are going to be unhappy. It's just about right for someone like me, who would take one sugar in a black coffee normally, but if you take more sugar than that, you'll be adding more. Fortunately, Nescafe have thought of people who don't have a sweet tooth and there's an unsweetened version to cater for you.

Of course, there is also the disadvantage of this not being a good product for the ethical shopper. It's a Nescafe coffee, which means it's made by Nestle. Having just found a conscience myself, this is likely to be the last time I drink Nescafe and it's almost enough to make me want to boycott the brand for quality reasons, not just for the unethical practices they've used.

If you like a good cappuccino, you're really not going to be a fan of this. I'm tempted to report Nescafe for false advertising, as this is really nothing like what I would normally expect if I ordered a cappuccino. If you like slightly sweetened white coffee, you might be OK with it, once you've got through the froth.

It's available in both sweetened and unsweetened versions and both caffeinated and decaff. 10 sachets will cost £1.77 from Tesco, or £1.88 from Sainsbury's, although there is a 2 for £3.00 offer at Tesco at the time of writing. It's worth noting that both supermarkets have an own brand instant cappuccino at £1.27 and £1.29 respectively for 10 sachets. As they can't really be any worse than this, if you're determined to try, you might as well try one of those and save yourself some money. Personally, it's not a course of action I can recommend.