Nescafé is not necessarily nes'crap'é

I'm not a coffee snob by any stretch of the imagination, but I do have some requirements going into a cup. First, the coffee can't be weak. I hate watery coffee, and the thin taste literally makes me gag. Second, because I like dark coffee but I can't tolerate too much bitterness, there must be milk or cream to cut the edge. I prefer whole milk or fattier, but I absolutely dislike skim milk in coffee. It is just gross. I also prefer milk to creamers. Third, although I can forgo the sugar, especially if the coffee is very creamy, I do like my coffee to have some sweetness. Cà phê sữa nóng, or Vietnamese coffee, perfectly fits this exactly: a small amount of strong, dark coffee is brewed with a drip filter and mixed with sweetened condensed milk. Voilà, it's perfect and delicious.

Being in America where coffee machines are rampant, a Starbucks is on every corner, and it seems that every other person you meet is a barista, I have a slight disdain for instant coffee. This is reinforced because most instant coffees I have sipped range from pretty gross to absolutely disgusting. If desperate, I will pull out my jar of super cheap Nescafé and mix it with hot milk and sometimes a packet of Swiss Miss in order to make it palatable. It's pretty nasty stuff. Nescafé's giant crystals seem to have trouble dissolving completely in water that is not quite hot enough. This makes it clump to anything else you add to the cup, be it sugar or powdered creamer or Swiss Miss or whatever, so when you try to drink it, you get powdery chunks of bitter brown exploding on your tongue and making you regret buying that jar in desperation. The taste is reminiscent of the crap that you scrape off the bottom of a cooking pot when you accidentally leave rice on for like an hour too long, and no amount of sugar or milk can cover it up completely. It's very unpleasant.

So I was surprised when I went to Japan, where they are picky about every subtle nuance in flavor, that my whole family drinks Nescafé. I refused the first couple cups offered to me because the thought of slogging down crystallized brown junk in hot water was so unappealing to me. I did accept one morning, though, and I was pleasantly surprised. It looks different, for one thing. Nescafé in America is the same texture as Folgers crystals-- about the size of large sand granules. In Japan, they grind it into a fine powder, the same size as creamer powder. Added to the cup were Creap, a Morinaga brand creamer product made from milk instead of corn syrup, and organic raw sugar. I have to say that it had to be one of my favorite cups of coffee ever. I won't attempt to describe the flavors since I'm not hip on coffee lingo, but the cup lacked the bitterness that I hate about American coffee crystals, it didn't have a chemical sweet taste, and the cream tasted slightly buttery, much like Japanese milk itself. Needless to say, I drank a lot of Nescafé with Creap whenever it was available.

To my dismay, nobody in Austin or San Antonio sells Creap at any of the stores I have been to (a large Chinese/Vietnamese [sort of Pan-Asian] market, a Korean market, and two small Japanese grocery stores), so I figured I wouldn't be able to enjoy that taste for some time. Even if I can't get Japanese milk in America, it would have been nice to have had a product made from Japanese milk. Anyhow, my boyfriend had been eying instant coffee/cream mixes at the Pan-Asian explosion market, and I told him that, although it's Chinese in origin, Nescafé in Japan tastes hella different from American Nescafé. We went ahead and bought a box of "Nescafé 1+ 2" (which, on the back clearly explains that 1 + 2 = 1+2. Brilliant!).

I have to say that I was gobsmacked. It may be the hidden lead or asbestos in the drink powder, but when mixed into hot milk instead of water, it tastes remarkably similar to my first cup of Nescafé and Creap. I'm not sure if I am just imagining things or not, but it has a subtle smelly-milk flavor that I remember from Japan.

I conducted an inquiry via Google, and apparently there are 200 varieties of Nescafé around the world, including the coffee by itself and the 1 + 2 = 1+2 convenience packs. Nestlé, for obvious reasons, changes its products to suit local tastes. It makes adapt to sell your product, but sometimes I wonder if Americans actually prefer the products that are made available to them, or if they don't know any better so they've never have to form a preference for other things. There are many American foods that I love, but there are even more that just confuse me as to how anyone could like them at all, or feel comfortable putting that much salt, sugar, MSG, dyes, preservatives etc. into their bodies. Now I am ranting. Anyway, that whole Time collection of articles is pretty interesting-- read the whole "issue" or read about the different varieties of the same brand around the world.

Anyhow, Nescafé 1 + 2 at the Chinese grocery store. It tastes good in milk.