We Tasted 4 of the Newest (and Most Photogenic) Instant Coffees

If you’ve browsed any of our coffee coverage, you know that we take our brew pretty seriously. From pour-overs to espresso machines, and from bean roast to brew strength, we have strong opinions about it all. This week, it’s all things coffee at Wirecutter.

Instant coffee, the lowliest in the caffeine-water pecking order, has gotten a lot more interesting lately. Popular roasters such as Stumptown, Verve, and Tandem are now pairing up with instant-coffee startups to offer their beans in Instagrammable and convenient packaging. The new wave of instant coffee is intriguing, if expensive ($3 per cup!), and it got me wondering: Can these fancy coffees—dehydrated into powder and reconstituted with hot water—really be better than my beloved Nescafé Gold instant coffee (which, by the way, comes in at only 15¢ per cup)? To find out, two Wirecutter staffers tasted seven coffees from four companies brewed with a standard 9 ounces of water. Spoiler: The packaging is handsome, but we’d probably still go for our Nescafé.

Note: While the two panelists for this article ranked the instant coffees in this order, a different panel of Wirecutter staffers actually preferred the Dripkit and strongly disliked our favorite coffee from Tandem. Taste is subjective, and, of course, variables such as temperature, preparation, and personal palates can all affect how a coffee tastes. Our ranking below is how we judged these instant coffees when we tested them that day.

1. Tandem Coffee Time and Temperature Instant Coffee ($15 for a pack of six at the time of publication)

Tandem’s instant coffee was our favorite and the one that most closely resembled an interesting coffee brew. We tried two different coffees: The Time and Temperature roast was a bit tart, with vanilla notes up front and an acidic finish, but it was also the least watery instant coffee we tasted. The Ethiopian Dalecho instant-coffee blend was good, too, and we found that its flavor had somewhat more depth and more dimensionality.

2. Dripkit El Mirador ($15 for a pack of five at the time of publication)

Inside a bag slightly larger than the biggest iPhone is a triangular cardboard Dripkit coffee dripper complete with a perfectly sized mini filter and preground beans. It’s not just instant coffee but also a whole disposable pour-over kit: Undoing the packaging and setting up the throwaway dripper just-so on my mug was delightful. Unfortunately, the coffee itself didn’t quite measure up. The El Mirador had the acidity of gas station coffee, though it was technically better than others we tried. The wastefulness of the packaging is a turnoff, too.

3. Voilà Discovery Box ($16 for a pack of five at the time of publication)

Voilà managed to fit five packets of instant coffee from five different small roasters into a “discovery box” that’s somewhat smaller than a pack of cigarettes. The packaging was almost too compact, though—bean dust spilled everywhere when I opened the first package of Voilà. We tried both the Presta Colombian blend and the 1000 Faces Brazilian blend. The coffees were okay but tasted like diner coffee: watery and basic, and lacking the depth of flavor of the Tandem and Dripkit packets.

4. Swift Cup Coffee Mainstay Blend ($12 for a pack of six at the time of publication)

Hidden within this package’s simple, minimalist branding was the worst jolt of instant energy we tried. Swift Cup’s Mainstay Blend resembled coffee on the surface but lacked any depth. My colleague noted that it was as if this coffee had been “brewed through the grounds for a second time,” not unlike some kind of watery sludge. The Colombia blend we tried was similarly unappealing. We wouldn’t recommend it.