An Instant Coffee Life: From Juan Valdez to Jean-Luc
Photo by Alayna the Extravagant via Wikimedia Commons
Most children believe in Santa Claus. I believed in Juan Valdez from the Colombian coffee commercials.
As a little girl, I would sneak croissants from the breakfast table and leave them on a plate outside the pantry, in hopes that someday I would open the pantry, and ¡Hola! Señor Valdez would be hiding in there with his trusty mule, Conchita, with a cup of Columbian coffee and a cheery “Buenos Dias!” I even learned Spanish in hopes of conversing with my favorite coffee grower and arriero. Bear in mind that I was an impossibly spoiled three year old growing up in Huntington Beach, California. Anything seemed possible-including a coffee break with Juan Valdez.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgO_Y6dwvPg]
I was sadly disabused of that notion when I was around six. But a far more influential coffee ad campaign was about to come into my life : The International Foods coffee commercials. If you ever want proof that advertising corrupts small children for life, I genuinely thought that when I grew up, I was going to drink International Foods Café Suisse Mocha and Café Vienna and wear tailored white slacks and mohair sweaters and have an exotic boyfriend named Jean-Luc.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcMpJlYynBw]
Then came the Taster’s Choice commercials. God bless the suits at McCann-Ericsson for creating the “best are-they-or-aren’t-they” anticipation in advertising history. 30 seconds was all it took to get my pre-teen self sucked into a soap opera level of racy innuendo. I didn’t even know what an illicit affair was, but dammit, I intended to have one. And with a foreigner with a sexy accent.
In 1998, the final Taster’s Choice commercial aired. We never knew what became of the couple. Were they going to live happily ever after? Was their love a stormy sea with broken hearts bobbing around like so much flotsam and jetsam? There are few TV shows that I miss from my childhood-they were merely half hour filler between my beloved coffee ads. (Cue “After The Love Is Gone”) I had no choice: since I had no more glamorous coffee commercials, by God, I was going to BE the glamorous coffee commercial. As I grew up, the vast majority of my questionable fashion choices and even more questionable foreign boyfriends can be attributed to my bizarre obsession with tailored slacks and Jean-Luc.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXpQxnkf2l0]
My passion for powdered instant coffee bewilders, if not downright offends, the majority of adults I’ve encountered in my life. Especially the lovers from foreign countries. They grew up with French presses and coffee houses on every corner. They grew up with grandmothers who possessed the masonic secrets behind Turkish coffee. Coffee was a way of life, a gathering of family and friends.
I don’t come from those kind of people. My ancestors performed backbreaking labor in coal mines, manufacturing plants, and construction sites. My grandmother didn’t have time to make a perfect cup of coffee for her man. She worked days, and my grandpa worked nights to put 5 kids through parochial school. Folgers Instant was the order of the day or night. No muss, no fuss. Put a tablespoon of coffee crystals in a cup, pour boiling water in, and voilà! A cup of coffee. Not good coffee, mind you, but who cares? It’s caffeine.
I don’t know how to use a coffee maker to this day. Maybe brewed coffee tastes better, but the work involved and my irrational terror of percolators precludes me from that pleasure. Coffee makers are annoying, high maintenance, and require cleaning with foul smelling vinegar that assaults my poor nostrils. And the glass pot is so freaking sensitive that if I even glance at it cross-eyed, it shatters on my poor defenseless countertop.
I have been told I should get a Keurig. Have you SEEN the price of K cups? My family grocery budget does not allow for that kind of luxury. Also, the single use K cups are wasteful. Just give me a 16 oz jar of Folgers Instant or Café Bustelo. I’ll have coffee for the next six months for less than seven dollars. And even better, a tin of International Foods Café Suisse Mocha only costs $3.47. I can buy two tins for what one damn macchiato costs at Starbucks. Screw the coffee snobs: they don’t buy my coffee or operate a coffee maker on my behalf. And if instant coffee was good enough for my great-grandma, my grandma, and my mom, then it’s certainly good enough for me.
Thanks for writing this post. I remember (some of) those commercials.
I’ll add that some instant coffee tastes pretty good, at least my taste buds. Have you tried Aldi’s instant brand? An 8 oz. jar costs about $4, and I love it. I’d also advise you to trust your instincts on Keurig. Not only are the k-cups (and machines) expensive, the coffee doesn’t taste very good, at least in my opinion. One of my problems with coffee makers is that my wife and I don’t drink enough to justify making a whole pot.Report
Thanks so much! I was expecting people to come for me with pitchforks. 😁Report
Senior Trip.
Was that really a thing, once?
It’s like watching Stranger Things and noticing that the parents just didn’t care what the kids did in the 10 hours between breakfast and dinner on Saturday.
“We used to live like that.”Report
Yep. As kids, we were free to wander the neighborhood and woods. I would go over to a friend’s house, knock on the door, their mom would get them, and we’d head out to play adventures in the woods.
Not only kids. When our dog needed to go outside, we’d just let her outside. After a maybe an hour, my dad would open the door, whistle and call her name, and then she’d amble home.
Some yards were fenced. Most weren’t. Ours wasn’t.
Stranger Things is pretty spot-on for “kids in the eighties.”
I grew up in a planned Florida suburb, which was its own kind of weirdness, but still, it was a lot like that.Report
If you don’t remember the senior trip to Paris, maybe this coffee isn’t for you.
Or is it?Report
I’ve heard vague tales of the senior trip but never experienced it myself. My entire high school music department was invited to compete in a music festival in Paris after we impressed somebody at a competition in Toronto. This immediately caused the parents to break into “this is an event of lifetime that we owe our kids” and “this is a planning nightmare that will disrupt testing.” My parents were on the pro-Paris faction but the anti-Paris faction won.Report
Oh, I went to school at the tail end of Senior Tripping. The Senior Trip was something you did as part of Spanish III (where you went to Spain) or French III (where you went to Paris).
(This was Westchester, by the way. For all I know, they still do this.)
When I came out to Colorado Springs, though, there was no Senior Trip.Report
Last year it maybe two years ago, I learned that senior proms on Saturday night were not uncommon. At least in late 1990s down stats, New York the tradition was for the prom to be on a Thursday and Friday to be senior cut day.Report
Love this (though I will not drink instant coffee knowingly.)
I forgot about that commercial but when I read it I instantly heard them exclaiming “Jean-Luc!” in my head!
I get the whole coffee commercial obsession. For me, it was print cigarette ads.Report
Write thatReport
I enjoyed the essay. While I appreciate fresh coffee I’m fine with it being a luxury after a meal at a nice restaurant or something along those lines. Currently life with a toddler and the rat race has my wife and I on the Folgers, ‘Murican for coffee kick. And that’s just fine.Report
I’m also remembering those coffee commercials where they secretly replaced the gourmet coffee with Folger’s Crystals commercials.
There is a phenomenon where if you tell a taste tester that the glass of wine they’re drinking is a $3 glass of wine and ask them to describe it, they’ll tell you “eh, it’s okay… it’s wine…” (or “It’s swill”) but if you tell them that it’s an $80 glass of wine and ask them to describe it, they’ll tell you “oh, it’s got notes of blackberry and smoke and it’s got a peppery finish”. Same glass of wine.
Folger’s Crystals weaponized this.Report
I do t know. I can taste the difference between instant and freshly ground coffee a lot easier than cheap and expensive wine. Cheap and expensive wine is still made in fundamentally the same manner. Instant coffee is more processed than ground coffee. It comes across in the taste.Report
I have never developed a taste for coffee. Tried it when I was a kid (as kids do), hated it (as kids do). Grew up loving the smell of it… it’s what morning smelled like in the house.
I had my first full cup of coffee when I was 20 (due to Lisa… sigh) and didn’t have an espresso until I was well into my 20s.
I can enjoy a fine Turkish Coffee or Espresso if the opportunity shows up (flying from Qatar back to the states, for example) but as a lifestyle drink, it never really caught on with me.
If asked to tell the difference between good coffee and bad coffee, I don’t think I’d be able to do anything beyond “this is strong coffee with a lot going on” and “this isn’t particularly strong coffee and there isn’t a lot going on”.
Now with wine? Oh, my goodness! This one has notes of blackberry and smoke and, my goodness, the finish is a little peppery!Report
What I find vaguely weird is that coffee is considered an adult drink in the United States, nearly on par with alcohol. In other countries, kids drinking coffee is common but it’s seen as an adults only drink in the United States that when foreign kids movies or lit is translated, coffee is often turned into cocoa.Report
For a long time, received American nutritional wisdom was that caffeine would stunt your growth, so there was a big push to avoid even the vague suggestion that kids might consume coffee and it would be okay…Report
That was a good commercial though.Report
At home? I will make a full pot of (very dark) coffee, with a pour-over or two in the PM. I have the time, equipment and such that this is the best solution. In a hotel, I will use whatever they provide before heading out to breakfast.
Camping is a whole ‘nuther ball game. If I am with my wife, I will make either a press-pot or use the little stove-top espresso maker I have had for ages. But that is with my wife, so its car camping. Back when I backpacked heavily, I would be decaf. And I would do that because I didn’t want to carry anything more than my little Coleman stove, which I only used to boil water. Tea, miso and instant coffee. Other than those it was gorp and jerky. Things I didn’t have to prep or cook.Report
I like my men like my coffee.
I don’t drink any kind of coffee.Report
Well, at least you don’t bill yourself as Professor Espresso.Report
I feel sort of fortunate in having no real idea about what constitutes “good” coffee and “bad” coffee because it saves money. I drink black coffee and we have trendier coffee shops around me and it all comes down to price. If I’m paying three dollars for a cup of black coffee, it’s not good. My palate is just fine with drinking 7-11 coffee. I can’t tell the difference.Report
I am firmly in the camp of “to each their own.”
I admit I thought my life would involve a lot more sitting around drinking General Mills International Coffee (it’s good!!) and a lot less cat litter boxes.
I always liked the Taster’s Choice commercials because they featured, as I called him, “Sexy Giles” (from Buffy) Even though the commercials predated the show, occasionally I saw one now and then after the show was on the air and never failed to think “Sexy Giles!!!”Report
When Sexy Giles busts his move by asking Sophisticated-British-Accent Lady for a second cup of coffee, and she gives him the jar of the product and tells him he can take it with her, I think we all know what that was.
Dude got his bad self Shot. Down. A cup of black instant coffee was all he got that night. Probably couldn’t get any sleep that night, thanks to a combination having caffeine too late at night and sexual frustration.
And really, who among us hasn’t been Sexy Giles getting shot down? Who hasn’t been there? That may be the genius of the commercial, making creepy pressure-his-way-into-the apartment-with-his-flimsy-ass-“begging-for-coffee”-trick guy somehow sympathetic.Report
Yeah, but Sexy Giles will do fine. After all, he’s Sexy Giles.
(Part of me wants to say “Sexy Giles” with the same cadence as “Pickle Rick” and I feel bad.)Report
Oh, and I always thought Giles was sexy. I didn’t need a coffee commercial.Report