My friend Tim and I just came out of a movie theater and went for a coffee.  The nearest Starbucks turned out to be inside a Target store, and in there, we were confronted by three earnest young people in Starbucks uniforms.

Pushing instant coffee.

I knew then what happened.  We were in the correct universe when we entered the theater.  When we exited, though, we stumbled into the wrong universe.

An evil, alternate universe

The same universe where James T. Kirk is a ruthless war monger and Spock’s chin is adorned by a demonic goatee.

And Starbucks sells instant coffee.

Madness!

The three earnest young Starbucks minions espoused the wonderful properties of this revolutionary new thing called instant coffee, like it’s never existed before, and how wonderful it is because of how finely it’s been ground.

And get this – you know what it tastes like?

Instant coffee!

Amazing.

Please, someone light a beacon, and lead me back to the correct universe.  Please?

Interesting, I thought.  “Can’t wait to try it,” I told her.

Skip ahead a couple of months.  I go into the McDonalds and sure enough, over to the side of their regular food counter, is a new high-tech coffee device.  Signs are all over the store for their new cappuccino in various flavors.  This time, instead of the bright cheery girl at the counter, I get a bored, unhappy, slovenly girl about the size of a mouse on stilts.

“I’ll try one of your mocha cappucinos,” I tell her.

“Oh,” she says.  “Uh.”  She has to call a manager over to ask her which button to push on the register.  Then they and a couple of the other employees have a quick huddle, and a big guy with dull eyes and a slack jaw, he seems to have been elected against his will to be the one to have to deal with the new coffee machine.

He doesn’t look happy.  In fact, he looks frightened.

Shuffling up to the coffee machine, he flips open instructions printed in large type right at his eye level, glued to the front of the machine.  I sneak a peak at it — very small words outlining the process in simple steps with lots of pictures.  Pick up a cup.  Squirt flavor syrups in it.  Pour in something from bottle A.  Put it under nozzle.  Etc.

He goes through the steps slowly, acting as if he’s diffusing a bomb.  When the steam part happens, he’s very tense.  So is everyone else behind the counter.  I suspect a mishap with the machine sometime in the recent past is to blame, but, who knows.

He finishes the mocha cappuccino, or what passes for one at McDonalds, and hands it over with relief.  Then he hurries back over to the fry bins, which is where he would have rather have been in the first place.

I take my McDonalds mocha cappucino over to a table and sit down.

Is it going to be any good?  I have my doubts, but, I try to remain positive.  I take my first tentative sip.  Then another.  I sigh, let it sit for a bit, and take a third.

Am I surprised?

No.  I throw the rest of it away and leave.

Starbucks has nothing to worry about.

YUCK!

Oh well.  I have to be honest.

If you like Southern Comfort liquor in your coffee, then this stuff is for you.  After you brew it up, it tastes EXACTLY like you’d just dumped two jiggers of the stuff into your coffee.

The flavor emulation is perfect, but alas, without the payoff of an alcoholic kick.

Don’t get me wrong.  I like Southern Comfort.  I just don’t like it in my coffee.

Why?  Because I like the taste of coffee.  No, more than like.  I love it.  I love the taste of coffee.

When you trash mess up destroy change the taste of coffee so much that you really can’t taste a coffee flavor anymore, is it really coffee?

Seriously, I want to know.  Because I don’t think it is.  It may have been once, but like a mad scientist changing an animal’s DNA, what you end up with is a mutant.  Something different.

Even as flavored coffees go, this one makes me … ill.

It’s so horrible it’s like watching a disaster movie. You can’t tear your eyes away. It’s like watching a boulder crushing cars and houses.

I’m having problems controlling my gag reflex.  Seriously.  I can’t drink it.

Yes, it’s that vile.  That is my opinion.  That’s my review, short and sweet.

I cannot finish drinking it.  I’m throwing it away.

Avoid this swill. It’s not groovy, not at all.

Made in Malaysia.

Man, you know this has got to be wonderful stuff, just by reading the product title. Not only is it a super coffee mix, and not only have they used the term “blue mountain,” but they have proclaimed it Premium Super Gold Coffee.

They used “super” twice. It’s Super Super Coffee.

I can only thank God it’s a tiny little can. I know this is going to be awful.

Let’s just hope it doesn’t have antifreeze in it.

I pop the top. I take a sniff. It’s amazing.

Yes, amazing. Amazing how stale a tinned coffee can smell. It takes staleness to a new height. It must be super super premium goldenly stale.

I have to admit I’m a little frightened of drinking it. I hope you guys out there appreciate me putting my life on the line like this for your amusement. Here goes nothing.

Okay, I’m surprised, it wasn’t half bad. It was in fact just as good as Godiva’s bottled coffee (yuck) and it went down smooth enough. It was much better than Hello Boss Cappuccino.

But, one thing I really did not like about it, was finding a piece of rice in my mouth afterward.

I hope it was a piece of rice. I looked at it closely under a bright light, and it didn’t appear to be a bug.

Not groovy.

It was “Hello Boss” coffee, a product of Taiwan. I had to buy it out of pure curiosity. I remember liking it more for the novelty than the taste.

Now you’ll find canned and bottled coffee everywhere, most of it pretty awful — but occasionally excellent — and there is no novelty involved.

Still, deep within the recesses of an Asian market, my daughters found for me cans of coffee they’d never seen before. And, thus, Hello Boss coffee reentered my life.

Let’s not mince words, here. It’s awful. Hello Boss Cappuccino tastes of cold instant coffee left overnight, mixed with the cheapest powdered creamer available to man, and leaves you with a taste that warns of the coffee itself having dissolved part of the can it came in … and you just drank it.

Not groovy. Not in the least.

Wal-Mart’s “Great Value” generic products are usually high quality. Their bottled water is perfectly good, and their cereals, breads, and canned goods sometimes equal or surpass the name brands. So I thought, let’s give one of their coffees a shot. Who knows, I may be surprised.

So early this morning, before the kids were awake, I brewed a cup.

Notice it says 100% Arabica? That should count for something, right? They also had a French Roast that said it was 100% Arabica, but then they had a can of “100% Columbian” that stated nothing of the sort. Which means, of course, it’s not 100% Arabica. Which means it’s cut with Robusta beans.

Robusta beans are evil. EVIL.

So I take my first sip of Great Value 100% Arabica and taste … what?

Um. Oh my. Um.

Flashback to childhood. I’m a little kid, and the bad girl next door has taught me a new word. “Fart.” I remember playing with my dog Pepper, and he let off a stink bomb, and I exclaimed, “Pepper let a fart!”

My mom was for some reason quite upset at the word fart coming out of her little boy’s mouth, and proceeded to drag me into the bathroom where she washed my mouth out with a blue bar of Zest soap.

That’s what this coffee tastes like to me. Soap. And, no I checked, my cup was not contaminated nor was my Hotshot water boiler, nor was my little cup-top filter.

This coffee, which is not really that bad in any other way, has a distinctly soapy tang to it.

And that, my friends, is not groovy.

It seems to me everything went downhill from there.

I did everything I could to brew this coffee so that the flavor would come out. I think I succeeded to some extent. You can taste underlying quality, and the ghost of a pleasant, full bodied roast.

Sadly this taste is veiled behind curtains of staleness. To me it tastes not only stale but somewhat sour. Not sour as in it’s gone bad and is going to kill me, but the taste itself has soured. It’s an aluminum can taste, mixed with shredded old socks and perhaps a pinch of vacuum bag dirt.

Seriously, this stuff is turning my stomach. I can’t even finish it. I’m dumping the rest down the sink.

You may see this in your hotel room. You may see it in on a bottom shelf at your supermarket. You may find it in the garbage.

If you do, leave it there.

Hillside Coffee, which comes in a coffee-mug shaped can with molded plastic lid and everything, has a chemical heating plant built right into the bottom. How cool is that? I had to pick up a couple just to try them.

Well, the next morning, I diligently read the instructions and proceeded to heat one up. It was a Mocha Latte. I had my reservations about the taste, but hey … I’m a guy, and it’s a gadget.

It felt like a new toy. I wanted to play.

How it works is you turn it over, and pull off a metal lid that’s much like popping the top off of canned pudding. Underneath is a plastic membrane with a button in the middle. You push the button down, which breaks an internal seal and mixes the chemicals. Six minutes later your coffee is hot.

Not warm. Hot!

After it’s hot, the directions say to shake it up to make sure the coffee, milk, sugar, etc., is all mixed, and then you pop the top like a soda can. So I shook it up, twisted the molded lid so it was aligned, and opened it. Sure enough the coffee-like substance was indeed hot. It was, I’d say, the perfect temperature.

The taste was far from perfect. The “milk” part of the latte tasted like powdered milk. The sugar was … well, there was too much of it. The coffee had the definite dilution tang that hinted of reconstituted instant. On top of that, you could taste the metal from the can.

I’m not really slamming Hillside, because you know it’s got to be hard to produce “coffee” in quantity and have it even taste somewhat like coffee. I mean, I tried one of the Godiva bottles of “coffee” the day before and it tasted just as bad.

[By the way, Godiva, stick to chocolate. M'kay?]

So, despite all this, it is drinkable after a fashion, especially because it’s in such a cool self-heating can. Not only do I finish this one, but I open the other one I bought, heating it up, etc.

This is where I ran into a problem.

After heating, remember, you’re supposed to shake it before opening the top. So it’s nice and hot, and I decide it’s ready, and I start shaking it. To my dismay I’m suddenly covered in liquid, and … it’s burning me!

That’s right. The bottom had sprung a leak! I was now covered in whatever chemical they were using to heat the can.

I made my way directly to the shower and rinsed myself off, clothes and all. Fortunately I hadn’t gotten any into my eyes — though it did come close — and I didn’t seem to have come to any harm. There were only a few spots — on my cheek, on my right index finger, and on the back of my left hand — that seemed red and irritated. But it was all very minor and at the time of this writing I’m completely fine.

It’s a good thing, though, I was at home and not on some fishing trip. I can see me jumping into a lake because of a chemical accident caused by a self-heating coffee can. You’d better believe the lawsuits would be flying. As it is, I’m willing to forgive but not forget. This article is a public warning, and a notice to Hillside Coffee that they have some quality control issues.