I remember a while ago seeing Nescafé instant coffee on the shelves. I loved the idea + bought it a few times. By instant, of course, I don’t mean “just add water”, I mean just press a button on the bottom. Two chemicals mix together and you instantly have hot coffee inside the can.
So when they stopped selling it, I was rather disappointed. But yesterday my mother came home from shopping (I’m a lazy teenager and so didn’t help her) claiming to have found a similar product. I was happy. Going to Reading Festival next week, I was very happy to find something I could drink in the mornings without firing up our gas stove.
But upon testing the product I became rather disappointed. Because everything that Nescafé got right about their coffee, everything I liked about it, was lacking in this version.
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Espresso
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Firstly, this is an espresso shot. It’s got Guarana extract in it and a hell of a lot of caffeine. It’s more designed as a medicine style product. A “wake you up” kind of thing.
Not really a drink to enjoy.
Though I would barely call it a shot. It’s listed as 40ml. I’m not entirely sure if that includes the chemicals used to heat it up because when I drank it there was about 1 mouthful. It wasn’t even a full mouthful.
Perhaps it appears to be less product because the size of the container in full is about 5 times the size of the serving of drink. This is down to the chemicals needed to heat it up.
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Instructions
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If I remember correctly, the Nescafé was clearly labelled and easy to figure out what to do. When I see a foil lid I naturally peal it back, expecting it to be shielding something below that I must operate. This was a bad judgement.
It turns out that you’re supposed to press the bottom of it first and shake for a bit. Somehow, despite being technically clearly labelled, my instinct wasn’t to do this. Somehow, it just wasn’t labelled in a way which made my brain think “don’t open the foil yet”.
So, although by examination it is very clearly instructed, I would argue that it isn’t.
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Heating
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Being the physicist I am, I replaced the plastic lid and was careful with the shaking when I heated it. Firstly, I know that the tiny bit of silver foil would make only minimal difference to the heating. Plus, I have since tried the second shot that my mum bought and done it properly. The result was the same.
You press the bottom and shake for 40 seconds. This bottom doesn’t look like a button, it isn’t marked very well. But you’ll know when you’ve pressed it because the cup gets boiling hot!
I can just see kids going into supermarkets and pressing all the buttons. It’s so easy to do without buying the product (thus why I assumed the foil would be protecting the mechanism). You wouldn’t know till you got home that a meddling child had spoilt your heating mechanism.
However, that wont matter too much. Because the actual coffee inside doesn’t seem to heat far beyond room temperature. After 1 minute (perhaps the extra 20 seconds allowed it to cool down again) of shaking, the coffee was barely luke warm inside.
I did, however, almost have second degree burns on my hand. But I’d continued shaking through the pain in the interests of science. The cup gets extremely and very uncomfortably hot very quickly.
Nescafé coffee was always hot out the can. Ok, it wasn’t as hot as coffee normally is but it was still quite warm. And they had a cardboard covering on the outside which stopped the heat getting to your hand. It worked!
I would warn anyone to keep this cup away from any surface that heat may damage. Then, of course, there’s children. For about 2 minutes the cup should be avoided by all adults and children!
Then, after just 2 minutes (I’d drunk the coffee after 1 minute so this wasn’t why it was cold) it becomes freezing cold. It’s amazing that such heat can disappear so quickly and that it fails to heat the product inside.
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The Coffee
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Ok. So the coffee is cold and there isn’t much of it. But that doesn’t matter right? I mean, it’s still tasting good isn’t it?
Well. I’m sorry but I don’t like espresso. Furthermore, my body isn’t used to such a caffeine and guarana (whatever that is) kick in such a short space of time. It gave me a headache.
But as espresso goes, it’s not too bad. It’s the same coffee you get with the rocket fuel coffees from percol I believe. Although I think it’s slightly stronger.
So the basic idea is that they’ve tried to include all the ingredients in the same portions of a full, proper, cup of black coffee into the small portion they give you.
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Conclusion
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This is bad, bad stuff. It don’t taste too bad but everything about it sucks. There’s no innovation, there’s no thought.
It’s basically just trying to get into a niche market as quickly and cheaply as possible. I’ve been told it costs a lot as well. It’s certainly not worth it. You’re not paying for hours of research and lots of thought. You’re paying for a hastily designed cup with a hastily (probably bought) thought up chemical process and a very small amount of actual product.
It’s the old Nescafé self heat coffees, but smaller, badly designed and badly implemented. They should have a look at what Nescafé did and do something similar if they’re going to do anything. But evidently, there is no market for self-heating coffee.
Thanks for reading,
Dean.
by (6%):
by (3%):
01.03.2008 23:49
Good review, but you cannot comment on the actual amount. An espresso shot is 40-50ml so it's about average to an espresso shot. Good review nonetheless =]
18.01.2005 01:04
sounds like utter bollocks coffee. i love my coffee and marketing this radge as part of the coffee tree-thing is disgraceful. oli
18.10.2004 09:05
If I drank this, I'd be climbing the walls for days - literally!