March 25, 2026–How many of you coffee bean explorers have sailed the seas with Starbuck, scaled the Andes with Juan Valdez, and saved a marriage with Mrs. Olsen, only to return to a cup of instant?
I was never a dedicated coffee drinker. I grew up in the days of Folger’s in a can, where my first tastes of that watery brew made me wonder where the mystique of drinking coffee lay? In fact in the 1970s I remember culture columnists predicting and lamenting the fact that contemporary youth were no longer drinking coffee, and the industry was on the very ropes its tastes evoked.
Some companies reacted by introducing exotic coffee flavors. Remember International Coffees, whose ads featured Victorian beauties sitting in white wicker staring at a lush garden while cradling a steaming cup of “French Vanilla?”
Yeah. No.
But then something happened. Something that always happens when pundits predict the end of a trend. A bold entrepreneur steps up and changes the rules, standing the status quo on its head. What if, Howard Schultz asked, we made coffee more than a commodity, gave it fancy names, and charged 10 times what a cup of Maxwell House cost?
Starbucks was born.
Suddenly yuppies were tasting flights of brew, comparing exotic estate-born beans harvested from the north side of a blue mountain in Jamaica or grown in a valley in Africa, and grinding beans that passed through the digestive tracts of Sumatran civet cats.
Not content with exotic sources, crafty brewers began roasting and grinding beans in burr grinders and hand-cranked coffee bean crushers.
While our cowboy settlers were fine tossing hand-ground beans into a dented can and setting it in the campfire, modern caffeine-istas turned to an array of Rube Goldberg-style contraptions from French presses to espresso machines that roasted, ground, steeped, and steamed your beverage, ready and waiting when you crawled out of your futon.
Through all this, your mom probably still made dad’s coffee in an old-fashioned percolator, catching the grounds to put on her garden out the kitchen door.
The reason this is on my mind, is because I recently had a flashback while searching the head-high aisle of bean choices at the local Supe–O–Mart. Tucked on a low self was a small jar of instant coffee. Ah, yes, I remembered. My first flirtation with coffee was back in the dorm room, where I put a teaspoon of freeze-dried crystals into a cup of tepid water from the tap. I never forgot that flavor.
So I bought a jar.
You know what?
Instant coffee is pretty darn tasty. It has many advantages: easy to prepare, you make it by the cup so there is no waste, and what don’t you understand about the word “instant?”
In other words, instant coffee is “good enough.” And “good enough” has become my mantra as I get older.
I’m going to start searching for more parts of my life that I have made needlessly complicated and pretentious. Like bread.
Do we really need gluten-free sprouted grain flourless organic bread? A home-baked loaf of sourdough made of wheat, salt, and water sure satisfies and soaks up the gravy just as well.
And goes really well with a cup of instant coffee.