Australian supermarket instant coffee taste test: the worst is ‘what we’ll drink during the apocalypse’

‘Incapacitated by a hurricane of emotions and heartbeats’: Nicholas Jordan downed 11 cups of instant coffee in one hour and left feeling dazed and confused by the brews. Photograph: Isabella Moore/The Guardian

Nothing has made me feel more unhinged and confused than drinking 11 different instant coffees in an hour. Unlike the five coffee professionals who joined me, I don’t have the caffeine tolerance or battle-hardened wisdom to make a judgment with one sip – I finished most cups. But while I was probably the only reviewer who spent the rest of the day incapacitated by a hurricane of emotions and heartbeats, I wasn’t the only one who was confused by what we tasted.

I was joined by Junji Tai (Brighter Coffee cafe), Adryll Lin (Condesa Co Lab coffee importer), Carolin Jung (Solstice cafe), Benjamin Johnson (The New Paradigm Coffee roaster) and Juwa Chu (Diggy Doos Coffee cafe), all knowledgable Sydney-based coffee professionals. As supermarket instant coffee is generally made with low-quality, heavily roasted robusta beans (robusta contains more caffeine and tastes earthier than arabica, the Australian cafe-standard beans), we came into this taste test expecting bitter, earthy and generally offensive coffees.