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.