There are some of those to be sure, but they take great pains to announce themselves as such.

As noted in other threads, we do street tastings between coffees we like/offer and supermarket offerings. We did Folgers regular a couple of weeks ago. Undrinkable to me (really, had to spit it out), but to many older folks it was the preferred brew. That said, we did one with Maxwell House Master Blend that I could drink black and that actually had detectable appealing flavor notes other than burnt tire and plastic. So it could well be that they’re getting better with their non-generic offerings.

This post and its subsequent comments have to be one of the most interesting discussions on coffee I’ve read this year. A pre-requisite read to this article would be “Trust.”

“How the coffee industry lost the public’s trust, and how good coffee can win it back again”

I hail from Singapore, and in these parts, the majority of the public drink hainanese coffee, which is served in almost every corner, in quite a few ways, eg. with Carnation (brand) milk, with sugar, less sugar, no sugar, condensed milk, black, stronger, etc. And how is this coffee roasted? It’s roasted, no, it’s charred to the darkest, well beyond the darkest french roast, (extremely carcinogenic) with butter/margarine, sugar and sometimes maize or barley added into the mix. The reason for these additives we were told being that the butter/margarine lends to its buttery fragrance, and the sugar its sweetness. [LIE]

The real reason (I got it from a source whose family was one of the pioneers in the Singapore coffee trade) is: The additives stretch the weight of coffee, and as they are all much cheaper than coffee, it means more money. The beans are roasted to charcoal because they were lousy greens to begin with. The butter/margarine simulates the coffee oils, while the sugar lends to the Malliard Reaction the coffee would have given if properly roasted. While home roasters have learnt that coffee loses weight during roasting, Singapore coffee actually gets a lot heavier after being roasted.

Unfortunately, the public doesn’t know squat and Hainanese coffee continues to be the number one coffee drunk in Singapore. And I know if I were to conduct Rick Westerfield’s taste test with good freshly roasted specialty coffee and Hainanese coffee, Hainanese coffee will still win hands down.

In summary, over here, it would be “How the coffee industry swindled the public, and how good coffee won’t even matter much.”