Starbucks Instant Ice Coffee

Yes, I know it’s “Iced Coffee,” but what do you think most Americans call it? The “d” in iced gets dropped and “Iced” becomes “ice.” Say it to yourself.

See? It just comes out “Ice Coffee.” We just like to make things difficult, don’t we?

So I was lucky enough to:

A) have heard they were releasing this product soon

and

B) talk to someone who didn’t read the corporate memo on the launch date of this stuff

Delivering something on Friday for a Tuesday launch might be a bit too early if you really wanted to keep it under wraps. Of course, I’m not the guy who got his iPhone 4 two days before the launch date, but I do feel a little special. They only sold one box of this today and they just happened to sell it to a food blogger. Go figure.

I bought a Starbucks card to get a free refill, and a guy ahead of me ordered an iced tea, but they made him a coffee instead. The girl behind the counter offered it to me as I was waiting for the other employee to grab a box of the instant iced coffee from the secret stash – perfect! Now I had a subject for the control group.

I mixed the instant coffee in. There’s a lot of sugar in this shit:

It was about 95% sugar and it just kept coming out. I wondered if the coffee grounds had settled at the bottom of the bag or something. Nope. There are two ingredients: Sugar, Instant and microground Arabica coffee. Yeah, Arabica is italicized because the ingredients are in small caps. I don’t know how to make small caps with HTML – let’s google that answer up right now.

I guess it works pretty well. There’s your answer for anyone wondering. Finding out how to show the code in HTML was harder than finding out how to show the small caps. I digress.

The Ready Brew is on the right, not like the palor really is going to change too much from regular coffee color.

The taste. The coffee was a lot more fruity than the richer, darker iced coffee brewed in the store. I just had cold brewed coffee for the first time this week, and that stuff had a distinctly fruity taste as well. This wasn’t some regular coffee, either, it was some top of the line shit from Joe: The Art of Coffee and it was at a Gay Pride foodie event, so you know they were going artisanal on our ass. I just used fruity, gay, ass, and a word that ends with “-anal” in the same paragraph. Yay, Freud! Maybe I should just dabble and get it over with, huh? Sign up in the comments section to be my first experiment.

One thing that was weird was the sediment in the cup:

I stirred it and swirled it pretty well before noting this, stirred a bit more, and it was gone. It does need a good bit more stirring than a regular hot instant coffee due to standard laws of molecular physics. I think you know where I’m coming from here.

Here’s my video review:

Bottom line, I liked the coffee. It’s not the same Starbucks brew, and it’s damn sugary, so I don’t know where they’re getting this Lightly Sweetened bullshiat. It’s hella fuckin’ sweetened. They’d better make an unsweetened version of this stuff, because I prefer my coffee pretty sweet, and this stuff is over-the-top sweet. And did I mention that it was sweet? Dude. Sweet.

UPDATE: I fucked it. You can see that I was using a Grande cup with ice. A grande is sixteen ounces, so that doesn’t give the sugar enough water to disperse in. Instead, get a Venti filled up 3/4 of the way, mix, and then have your bro ice you. It’s much better and less sweet. Still probably a bit sweeter than you might like, but it’s a lot better today.