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Coming Soon: Self-Heating Coffee
prostoalex writes "In 2005 Wolfgang Puck will start selling containers of self-heating coffee, USA Today says. The combination of calcium oxide and water will heat the coffee to 145 degrees and keep it warm for the next 30 minutes. The coffee will be sold in regular grocery stores, and folks at Fool.com tell Starbucks to watch out as this product, coming from a well-known chef, might target those of us grabbing a cup of hot latte on the way to work."
we have these in the UK. They taste about as good as warmed up cold coffee. Which is basically what it is....
There's no point having a really quick cup of coffee if it tastes like shit.
I've tried the version available in Europe, and even allowing for the fact it's Nescafe to start with, it can't be described as even vaguely resembling coffee. Might be worth having in the car for emergencies, but it wouldn't replace anyone's daily coffee if they have any taste buds.
Phil
To state the obvious, the coffee doesn't generate its own heat (or it would be full of slaked lime, which might impair the flavour). The lime and water, to produce the heat, are in a jacket around it.
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
I don't quite understand how that can be a time saver. My kettle takes about a minute. I do realize that I then need to be less productive in other areas for about the five seconds it takes to pour the water in the mug and stir.
We've had this for a long time in the UK. Or at least I saw this for the first time three years ago; I haven't seen it recently. I tried it twice, and both times it didn't seem to get very hot, although I did follow the instructions.
Reality is defined by the maddest person in the room
This has been tried now on more than one occasion in the UK, most recently by Kenco, I think, but previously by PG Tips with tea (again, my memory my fail me on this) but I think this has now been on the market for more than four years on and off, as I remember trying it while at university! FWIW, the coffee is better than the tea, but with the ubiquity of Starbucks etc... how desperate can you really be for a cup?
Starbuck's is ok, but I always got the impression that they are the big name because of marketing and locations rather than having a really great product. Why are they always the benchmark that everyone tries to meet or beat? Their coffee is ok, but nothing special. If you can find a local coffee shop that roasts beans on site and grinds them fresh for your cup, you'll get a much better cup of coffee, potentially cheaper than starbucks.
As for this coffee in a can... Well, I can't imagine how good it would really be. It will probably be ok, given that it's going for a lattle, most likely flavored and sweetened. I don't think this could work for a plain old cup of coffee, but for a coffee drink with milk and flavoring it will probably mask enough of the stale coffee flavor to be drinkable.
Comparing this to Starbuck's is foolish. People go to Starbuck's so they can say they go there. And to be seen there.
Your average coffee drinker does not even realize that most all Starbuck's coffee is over roasted and made of inferior quality beans. The really scary thing; the quality of Dunkin Donuts coffee beans are higher than Starbuck's! I did not know this, but a coffee guru (bean tester and whatnot for major coffee companies) tells me it is true.
That's 336 K for physicists.
Any sufficiently advanced libertarian utopia is indistinguishable from government.
As a Costa Rican, the idea of instant coffee is insulting, let alone self-heating coffee.
Every time I go home, I bring a few months' supply of 100% pure Arabica beans. Here in the US good coffee is insanely expensive.
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Now why don't they take this tech an use it with soup? In fact why didn't they do soup first? After all if you are essentially just reheating coffee it will probablyt taste like crap, but re-heated soup doesn't often taste much worse than when it starts.
Just a boy doing unproffesional IT work that's way above his head.
Do you ever eat "iron-fortified" cereal? Those metal shavings combine with oxygen in the air in an exothermic reaction. Guess you'll have to stay away from cornflakes from now on.
wow, thats pretty hot.. or are you still using fahrenheits?
Actually, it's rather cold. Assuming that a SI unit pedant would use Kelvin...
I believe posters are recognized by their sig. So I made one.
Meals Ready to Eat, the US Army's replacement for it's old rations, usually come with a similar contraption: a wafer of material which is massively exothermic when combined with water.
It comes in a bag; you add water and then stuff your entree into the bag. The water comes to a boil (or at least apparently; it may just be hydrogen evolving from the reation, and they tell you not to use it in an enclosed place). The food goes from room temperature to way-too-hot-to-eat in a few minutes.
They recommend two of them if the food starts off frozen, but I've found that one will take it from rock-solid to tolerable (the things were designed to be eaten room-temperature as well.) It's not exactly luxury food, but it's incredible to have have hot food available almost instantly without having to carry cooking equipment or starting a fire.
Mmmm... alligator.
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McFacts about the McDonalds Coffee Lawsuit
http://lawandhelp.com/q298-2.htm
Please read before making an uninformed comment.
I can't wait to walk down the coffee aisle and surreptitiously push the "heat" button on dozens of cans of coffee. Muhahaha.
"Damn, I got another can of self-heating coffee that doesn't heat!" I can almost hear the recalls as we speak. Another global corporation out to kill my neighborhood coffee shop, foiled by little old me.
What's your damage, Heather?
As others have said, self heating coffee has been available in the UK for 3-4 years. But using the Calcium Oxide/water reaction to heat food goes back at least 20 years. When I was a kid, self-heating cans of food were available for a while in camping shops.
Now with extra alkaloids!
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
self-peeing beer. Please.
"Wow. Now THAT'S a lot of angry Indians." - Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer
I concurr. Dunkin Donuts has really good coffee.
The founder of Starbucks had a business insight:
1. Sell cheap coffee for 4 bucks. 2. ??? 3. Profit!
Step two being: Yuppies will buy it just to feel cool.
The perfect sig is a lot like silence, only louder
These ready-to-eat-at-any-moment solutions are just terrible. They always come with lots of plastic, tin-foil, etc. They shouldn't really be used in everyday life, but, because people are leading such frantic lives, working a lot and consuming way too much, they end up generating a lot of rubbish! If you go to McDonald's, your food could weigh less than all the plastic and paper that comes along with it! It's insane!
This technology reminds me of the greatest example of well-aimed technical documentation... EVAR!
Presenting...
The MRE "Rock or something" manual.
Wouldn't it be pure vapor then?
Oh wait, fahrenheits...
Self-heating or not, US of A still wander in the ice age.
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And we're a third-world nation"
A.D.
do people start breaking them open to see what's inside and spilling the boiling contents on their laps? Do they have a warning telling people not to do that? Or is self-responsibility considered more widespread across the pond?
"Look here, Cletus. This is what them's calls calcium oxi--- aaiiiiieeeeeeeee!!!!! Muh giblets!!"
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master."
This will be a dud. It may have a niche market among hikers and campers, but that is about it.
People buy coffee at Starbucks because they like the ritual and the atmosphere. It is a kind of human contact that, although shallow, provides some satisfaction without there being any accompanying obligations. ( Am I supposed to wail at the alienation and isolation of the modern world here? Well, real relationships like we had in the good ol' days still exist, now we have something extra in addition to that. )
It's the same reason people would go to a cinema to see a movie, even if they could see it at home on a home theatre system that provided an equal quality presentation. It's the same reason that fast-food restaurants, and cafes like Starbucks, haven't been automated with machines replacing human help to the extent that they could be.
So it won't replace Starbucks cafes, and it won't be a quick-grab-a-cup convenience store seller either, because convenience stores sale brewed coffee already at a lower price.
So, this thing produces a cup of something that is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike coffee?
I'll turn into a supernova and burn up everything. Well I'll turn into a black little hole and you'll turn into string.
Nescafe Hot was a flop. "In 2002, Swiss beverage maker Nestle SA tested a self-heating can holding its Nescafe Hot When You Want coffee in England. But the company ended the trial run after several months, finding the can did not heat the liquid to a consistent temperature, said Nestle spokesman Francois-Xavier Perroud. "It didn't pan out," he said. Nestle is still interested in the idea, which it believes will be popular with consumers, but it is "not aware of a self-heating can that lives up to our expectations,"
The only real use I can see for it is when hiking or as part of an emergency kit.
Kevin
"It's not the cough that carries you off, it's the coffin they carry you off in" O. Nash
Those are two places you don't want to make fun of even jokingly. I swear they put crack in their coffee, people are SERIOUS about loyalty to either of those chains. Be safe, say you are sorry, and maybe no one will get hurt. Think of all those coffee-laced, pent up, hockey fans.
Never confuse volume with power.
People go to Starbuck's so they can say they go there. And to be seen there.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but where do people think going to Starbuck's is a status-enhancing gimmick? The only place where this might work is East Podunk, USA. In most metropolitan areas the Starbuck's outnumber the Kwik-E-Marts and carry about the same cachet. They are appealing because a) they are absolutely everywhere [in most cities], i.e. convenient and b) the product is generally consistent across stores in different regions. (This also explains the success of chain restaurants in the US.)
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
Its this new technology called an 'insulating mug'. It costs about $5 at Walmart and is dishwasher safe. You pour the coffee in and it stays warm while you drink it.
Mathematics is made of 50 percent formulas, 50 percent proofs, and 50 percent imagination.
Nescafe marketed these sorts of drinks s few years back, but as the above poster says, they were basically just warmed up cold coffee, and tasted like it too. Plus, you didn't get much, god only knows what the enormous containers did to the environment, and they cost far too much.
They were withdrawn from sale shortly after introduced, due to lack of popularity.
..in europe (at least in the UK; but nescafe are a european brand, so I'm guessing the stuff spread), but it was *terrible*. The stuff tasted disgusting, and if your can of coffee was cold to start with (as opposed to room temperature), it warmed up lukewarm; as I discovered when woken up on a signals exercise at 3 in the morning; I just ended up binning half a dozen cans and falling back to redbull to get my caffeine hit for the morning.
If you really really want lukewarm reheated instant coffee for the price of a latte at starbucks, great. For the rest of us, thermos flasks suffice (Or if you require masochism in your life, simply carry around a flattened paper cup with a few single-serving packets of instant coffee; just add lukewarm tap water, and you're good to go - and for a fraction of the price!)
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