Travel Coffee 4: Kirin Fire Quality Brew

Well, it's only been an hour or so since my last coffee but I felt the need to try and up the number of coffee reviews on this trip. So the next review is Kirin's Fire 'Quality Roast'. This time, I managed to remember to get the hot coffee rather than the cold. This time it came in a flashy blue can with a fun pattern on the side. It's another ring pull (which I still find odd for a coffee).

Opening up I got an unusual aroma - it was rather sweeter than expected. Then it hit me - I think I'd picked a sugared coffee (not being able to read Japanese, this can happen...). Well, the flavour of the coffee is completely masked by the sweetness of the sugar, which is a real shame. There is some nuttiness, and next to no bitter flavour - it's really not like coffee at all. Shame!

I checked the can for signs of anything about the coffee, but there wasn't anything I could decipher (except that it has 35kcal - another clue that it contains sugar).

So another coffee disappointment - of my own making.

Travel coffee 3: Georgia European Black (iced) coffee

Another day, another coffee from a coffee machine. Once again the place where we stayed didn't have coffee at breakfast (except Nescafe...), so I made the most of a brief stop at a station to try a different vending machine coffee.

I made a bit of a mistake when buying the 140 yen coffee - I forgot to check that it was hot, and it turned out that it wasn't. Oh well, never mind - I'd had iced coffee before, and I'd even tried cold brew recently.

Although I've had iced coffee before, I've not had it black - and in my memory, iced coffee is often rather creamy and quite sweet. As a black coffee, I was interested to see how this would be.

Opening the screw top, I was surprised to note that it had an aroma like iced coffee. I almost assumed that it was, and that I'd made a mistake, but looking in it was definitely black. The initial aroma was sweetish, with a bit of dark chocolate.

On first taste, it was slightly sweeter than expected. Now it struck me that the label says "European" (and as I understand it, there are other options - so European is a type), so I wondered if this was meant to be descriptive. Perhaps this was their interpretation of European coffee - as opposed to, say, American. With that in mind, it made a little more sense to me - the European coffee that I know (Northern European, at least!) is smooth, balanced, and not too bitter, just like this can of coffee was.

No sooner had I thought that then I suddenly felt like I was drinking a cold cup of coffee at a hotel somewhere in Europe, which was then a bit mentally disappointing. I often find coffee in France and Germany to be a bit poor, and to have it cold...

But this was primarily mental. The coffee was pretty good for the £1 it cost, and I could be pretty happy that it was better than many I would get in the UK. And, to boot, I bought it from a vending machine; or, as they sometimes say here in Japan, a 'bending' machine.

Additional footnote

I was trying to find the caffeine content of the coffee in the can by looking at the label. Now, I don't read Japanese (or speak it) but certain foreign words I can get. And although I couldn't find the caffeine (I was looking for 'mg' somewhere other than in the nutrition information), I saw some percentages.

It turns out that this blend is 26% Colombian, 25% Brasilian, and 25% Guatemalan. I'm not sure what the remaining 24% is, but that's encouraging. There was also no sign of whether it was Arabica or Robusta beans, but it was more than I thought I'd get!

Travel coffee 2: Fresh Japanese coffee from a shop

So today's issue was that there wasn't coffee at breakfast. This is fairly serious!

I was going to buy a vending machine coffee like the one I reviewed on the previous post, but then felt that actually, I might like to have something a bit different. I was idling away some time waiting for a boat to take me across Ashi Lake in Hakone, and in the shop they did have some bottles of coffee in a hot cupboard (I wish I'd taken a photo - they have a drinks fridge, but the top level is hot).

However, I'd passed a cafe in the same shop, and I'd seen that they were selling fresh coffee. Great! I was interested to see how fresh coffee really tasted in Japan - whether their cafe culture would like up to the one I'm used to. Moreover, the coffee was 300 Yen, which was more than twice the price of the canned coffee in the 'fridge'.

The coffee came in rather a small cup, which was a bit disappointing for the price (300 Yen is about £2.20). No clue to the quality of the coffee from the look of it, or the way that it was served - it was dispensed from an anonymous machine behind the serving counter.

The aroma didn't give much away in terms of clues either. It barely smelled of anything, except heat.

The first taste confirmed my suspicions: this was a rather high-margin product served at a tourist cafe. The coffee was watery, with not a great deal of flavour, and only a mild caffeine kick. It was really hot, actually, which to me is sometimes an indicator of poor quality coffee; it could be because it's kept at a high hot temperature in an urn somewhere.

I can't really say much more about it. It had a bit of bitterness, not much in the way of actual flavour, and I was trying to get it down quickly so I wouldn't have to carry the cup - so I ended up slightly burning my mouth.

So from now on I'm sticking to vending machine coffee.

Review 12: Seattle's 'Best' Coffee

Source: KFC Reading Gate
Date: 27/05/2015
Country: Don't know
Beans: Don't know
Preparation: Not sure, but probably filtered

Nose of grounds: N/A
Colour of brew: Deep, dark brown
Nose of brew: Not much, though a slightly alarming chemical hint
Early flavours: Light and bland
Finish: Not a great deal, but not bad either. Some rounded bitterness

Tasting notes:

Any coffee marketing itself as 'Seattle's Best Coffee' (it's not actually a marketing slogan - it's their name) is asking to be held up to high scrutiny. Many will know that Seattle has a reputation for high quality coffees, and Starbucks itself originated from that city. Here in the UK Starbucks made its big break by buying the Seattle Coffee Company chain and converting them to Starbucks.

Coffee Kit: Travel mug

Aladdin Travel mug

Recently I was given a travel mug for Christmas. It's the Aladdin recycled plastic mug which does a great job for a number of reasons.

No odd taste

This was actually the most important part for me. I've owned a number of different travel mugs/vacuum flasks, but most of them have metal on the inside, which makes the coffee taste funny. And when you care about the taste of coffee enough to write a blog about it, then this matters. There are apparently a number of methods you can use to eliminate this, but they sound a bit complex. This mug has no discernible impact on the taste of the coffee, though I should say I have only tried it with my standard Lavazza-in-a-cafetiere morning coffee routine.

It's recycled

It's made of other plastic bits. Usually that's a good thing (I say usually because there are some recycling processes that are worse than starting from scratch), and here they claim to use up to 95% recycled plastic. And the mug can be re-recycled, according to their website.

It's watertight

I don't know why this is not more common, but so many travel mugs have slide openings at the top which are not actually watertight. They're completely fine if you're just carrying the mug from home on the train or similar, but you can't put them in a bag (in case they fall over) and there's always a bit of concern if you're putting them in a car and they slosh around a bit.

These mugs don't have that issue - the lid clips shut and I've had no qualms about putting it in my bag even upside down (though there's no need to tempt fate). Better yet - you can still open and close it with one hand, though reassuringly it's not very easy.

It actually keeps your drink quite hot

Though this is the weakest point, the mug does a great job at keeping the drink inside hot. You can put it in your bag when you leave home and half an hour later it's at a great temperature. I reckon a neoprene sleeve would cover over the weakness of it not keeping it hot for hours, but for a commuter mug it's great.

Any downsides?

Apart from the fact that it won't act as a long-term solution, the only downside that I could think of is that it can't be put in a dishwasher. But as I'm using it every weekday, that isn't really a problem. And washing it out on a daily basis keeps the likelihood of an odd taste creeping in to a minimum.