Best Instant Coffee of the World

I’m a coffee lover. Ok, coffee addict. No, really, a coffee lover cos I can forgo coffee anytime and I won’t get any withdrawal syndrome.  But I’s much rather be known as a coffee connoisseur for I love coffee at its rawest form: BLACK.

Vietnamese Coffee Plunger

Legend has it when a goat-herder in Abyssinia named Kaldi was tending his goats up on the mountains , observed his goats dancing on their hind legs after eating some of the red berries. He wondered what had caused the strange behaviour in his goats and tried some of the berries for himself. He himself was soon observed to be dancing with his goats after consuming some of the berries himself.  The imam who came along found that this was no regular fruit and shared the coffee beans with others . Thus began the Ethiopians’ and the world’s love affair with coffee. That was how the legend went.

Regardless whether that story was true or not, one thing is clear, coffee is loved by many around the world. About 7 million tonnes of coffee is produced around the world with about 400 billion cups consumed per year. Of course, the numbers are somewhat skewed toward the developed countries with Finland taking the lead. In Finland an average of 11Kg of coffee is consumed per person per year. According to Wikipedia, Singaporeans consume no coffee. Whoever contributed that figure to Wikipedia must have come from Mars for virtually at every street corner there is a coffee shop. We Singaporeans drink our local kopi, kopi c, kopi o, kopi tarik, and the more exotic latte, cappuccino, expresson, macchiato, long black, Americano, frappucino…For Singapore, the figure is more like 1.9kg per person per year with about 55% of all hot beverages consumed being coffee.

So, how do you like your coffee? I love my coffee black, just black. I personally believe that having it black gets the caffeine straight into my blood system. One day I might just try to shoot it intravenously.  But I won’t take the locally roasted version black. I normally have local coffee with evaporated milk – the kopi c variety. The reason is: locally roasted coffee tends to be more acidic and they mix sugar and corn flour (in some instances) when roasting and you don’t get the real stuffs. But give me a full bodied dark roast anytime (not the weak Brazilian variety).

When travelling, I like to take my coffee along. This is because sometimes I can’t get any decent coffee. With my Vietnamese coffee strainer/plunger, I can have good coffee anytime. This is especially so when travelling to Jakarta. I don’t seem to get any good coffee from the hotel. Some might argue they have Star*##k in Jakarta too. But honestly, I simply think they’re not good enough.

Best Instant Coffee

When all else fails, especially if I need to travel to places away from civilization (which happens rather often) – I have my trusty Bushells instant coffee. You might scoff at me for even drinking instant coffee (if I am really the self-professed coffee connoisseur). But you ain’t drink nothing yet till you tried Bushells. They really make very good instant coffee. While it is never going to be ever as good as freshly brewed (especially those from an expresso machine that gives you the ‘crema’), Bushells is a good alternative.