Coffee Disasters

Riding along on the tail of Office Coffee from Hell is its twin brother, hotel room coffee.

Usually this is slightly better than the office coffee, but suffers from the same problems.

It’s a questionable blend, often including Robusta beans. It’s usually quite old and stale, having set in a warehouse for years. And, they never provide enough to make a decent pot of coffee.

Once upon a time, some hotel somewhere had this great idea of putting a coffee pot into every room, and the idea was such a hit that all the other hotels cursed and kicked the dirt and grudgingly did the same. Painful as it was to them — as it no doubt cut into their profit margin — they had no choice because customers are a fickle lot. They for some reason like the idea that someone might actually care about them, and want to cater to their needs.

So all the other hotels said, “Okay! Fine! We’ll put a stupid coffee pot in the rooms.” And they did, but then searched far and wide for the cheapest possible coffee on the planet to go with them. That coffee, of course, sucks. It tastes like hot muddy water with ground up porcelain and a dash of mold.

Yet, if you go down to the lobby, these very same hotels usually serve very good coffee during their free continental breakfast — which they were forced to provide because some hotel, somewhere, started the trend. And you know all these hotels curse that fact as well.

Unless you want to actually bring your own coffee, my suggestion is to take your empty pot down to the continental breakfast and fill it up and take it back to your room.

And take that nasty bag of so-called “coffee” they provided, write NO THANK YOU on it with a large permanent marker, and leave it at the front desk as a reminder that people really don’t appreciate crap.

What’s wrong with this picture?

This, my friends, is a sack of old, stale ground coffee. Lord knows how old, and no one knows what’s in it. There is no list of ingredients. My guess by the taste is that it’s at least 50% Robusta beans, maybe more.

Robusta beans suck even if they’re fresh.

If that wasn’t bad enough, there’s about 1/3 of what it takes to make a pot of coffee in this bag, but the instructions say to use this one bag to make 12 cups of coffee.

Ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce you to the reason corporate office coffee tastes so awful. Most corporations only grudgingly provide free coffee to the employees, and in doing so, want to spend as little as they can. Their solution is to hire a coffee service, such as this one, to provide this coffee.

This company, themselves, want to make as much profit as humanly possible from this so-called service.

What do you end up with? Something that in my opinion tastes like dirt mixed with crushed bugs.

I’ve tried to improve the taste. I’ve tried brewing it stronger. It didn’t help — this coffee is a lost cause. The only way to make it drinkable is to add a significant amount of sweetener, and flavorings, and creamer.

This is American corporate office coffee from Hell.

My well-meaning daughter picked this up whilst out shopping: World Market Chocolate Turtle Coffee. It’s pre-ground flavored coffee.

I like many of World Market’s products, and while I’m not a huge fan of flavored coffees, I do like some of them. However, you would think that they would know that turtles don’t taste good, and not put them into coffee.

This actually tastes like they ground up a turtle’s shell and mixed it right in. Seriously. There’s this odd aftertaste of old ground-up bone, which is probably just a tang of staleness picked up by the coffee as it sat in a warehouse for seven years.

I’ve had canned coffee that tastes better than this stuff. I’ve had instant coffee that tastes better. The hint of coco that makes the “chocolate” in the “chocolate turtle,” even that tastes stale.

Yuck.

It could be that this was just a bad lot. It could be that this usually tastes fine. But unfortunately this one didn’t.

If World Market wants to send me a fresh batch to try, and I like it better, I’ll revise my opinion. Until then I have no choice but to advise people to avoid it.

“Casa Coffee. Truly pleasure in a cup.” That’s what it says. It’s made in Taiwan.

I discovered this interesting coffee at the local Chinatown market, and was intrigued more by the packaging than anything else. What you get is a six serving pack, each envelope containing a clever little one cup filter system and a (too small) packet of coffee. You unfold the packet and it hangs at the top of the cup, the top of the filter open, and you aim the water at the opening.

It works exactly like the little cup-top filtration maker I swear by. Works quite well, too. Kudos to the package designers, it’s a neat little gadget.

As for the taste, I wasn’t expecting much, and I was right. Have you ever sprayed bug poison in the air and accidently gotten a bit of it in your mouth?

That’s what the taste of this coffee brought to my mind. Bug spray.

While it didn’t say one way or the other, I suspect 100% Robusta beans. Yeah. That bad.

The concept is great, but they need twice as much coffee for a decent cup, as well as a decent coffee to begin with. What I’m going to do with the five remaining packs is dump their disgusting coffee grinds out and use my own.