Lately, I’ve been reacting to fancy coffee the same way a child reacts to an accidental sip of red wine mistaken for grape juice. I don’t know when it happened, but I’ve devolved into an unexpected love affair with bad coffee. It’s not just instant coffee that I hanker for each morning, either, it’s any subpar coffee I can get my hands on. (As I write this, I am a (sic) sipping a watery cup of java from an old pancake house down the street from my office in Little Italy.) Instead of that gourmet market in my neighborhood, I’ve begun perusing the coffee aisle of my local Ideal Supermarket like I once did the cereal aisles of my youth. I’m delighted by the big, red jars of Folgers, the yellow Chock-full-o-Nuts, the sky blue cans of Maxwell House.
I go through seasons of coffee fussiness. AeroPress, V60, drip. Lately though, I’ve swung hard towards “bad but dead simple coffee” in the form of Folgers Classic Instant Roast Coffee. I’m loving it. Don’t at me.