Cheap Coffee of the Week – Cafe Bustelo Instant

cheap coffee of the week February 9th, 2013

Alert readers of this blog will remember that I already covered Cafe Bustelo, but seeing as that was almost 8 years ago, it’s time to revisit it – with a twist!

cbinstant I didn’t drink coffee at all my first two years of college; once I transferred to a new school and moved into the dorms I made up for two years of caffeine abstinence. I started out in my college dorm with a $10 electric kettle and a jar of Medaglia D’Oro instant espresso. Instant espresso kept me up through my first two computer science classes, with limited computer resources sometimes requiring oh-dark hundred hacking sessions in order to get an open port on an old VAX computer.

A year later, I got a job as a programmer/sysadmin at my college’s bookstore. I started writing programs for a living, supporting a cranky PICK midrange computer and  supported users in the real world instead of writing abstract code;  this started me on a career in IT operations instead of computer programming.

We had a coffee shop in the building and the baristas, who all appeared to have a crush on my co-worker kept us in free coffee much of the time – as long as we went for coffee together. One rule in that office (which reminds me of the IT Crowd office, but smaller and darker) was that all cups of coffee had to be drunk by the time you left. Sometimes you’d have that cup of cold coffee from the morning hanging out – bottoms up! At least I drunk mine black.

Weekend work was needed, and the faithful baristas that served us were nowhere to be found. For those times, a large jar of Nestle instant coffee and microwaved water would suffice. We’d have a coffee klatsch in my dungeon-like office on those weekends.

I soon graduated to a Krups Aromaster drip coffee maker, cheap beans from local San Francisco roasters, then onto moka pots, espresso makers, better espresso makers, and to present day, drinking locally roasted fair-trade, shade grown, single-variety artisanal beans, an industrial-strength boiler espresso maker and individually poured drip cups.

…But I still come back to instant.

Cafe Bustelo instant reminds me of those first cups; it’s got the dark flavor and slightly bitter, arabica bite of ground Bustelo. It’s slightly watery, but still flavorful -  like you’d made Bustelo in a moka pot and added a touch of water to it. While I still will brew a cup of real coffee first thing in the morning, I think I prefer instant for that second/third/fourth cup in the day  – and remember banging on an old amber screen terminal in a darkened office with a computer the size of a Yaris behind a glass wall in a raised-floor computer room.

Big Lots has a 7 ounce jar for $5.95.

4 cups. Poindexter sez check it out.

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