The Case Against ‘Good’ Coffee

One day in the grocery store, I found a solution staring me in the face in the form of a surprisingly large array of instant-coffee options. Experience had taught me that it tasted horrible. In my 20s, I worked abroad at a newspaper staffed largely by expat British journalists who drank Nescafé as if it were water. I wondered what — historically, culturally — could explain this; maybe the Blitz? Nescafé tasted to me like something formulated in a malicious lab experiment involving dust and cinders and few, if any, coffee beans. It didn’t help that the dehydrated crystals resembled the droppings of a small, disease-carrying rodent.