Coffee in a Can

Not talking cans of unground beans here, but rather ready-to-drink cans of coffee. When I lived in Japan in the early 1990s one of the things I actually enjoyed where the cans of ready-to-drink coffee found in the ubiquitous coin-operated dispensers found on roadsides and alley ways all over the country. Now Coke is joining forces with Italian coffee purveyor illy to sell cans of coffee the world over.

Coke's illy issimo drinks, which include an espresso, a latte macchiato and a cappuccino beverage, cost about $2.69, or about 15 percent more than the Starbucks drinks, the company said. It is targeting upscale locations such as Whole Foods Market Inc.

The drinks will soon launch in Japan, which the companies said accounts for three-fourths of the roughly $17.4 billion market for ready-to-drink coffee beverages.

Source: Reuters

Review Illy Medium Roast Espresso Beans

In our continuing search for the best and worst espresso beans out there I splashed out and recently bought some Illy Medium Roast espresso beans. As I mentioned in last week's post, Victrola Espresso Beans Are Great, I purchased 6 half-pound cans of the beans directly from Illy USA using their website at a cost of $72. This is about twice the cost of beans I have recently reviewed favorably from coffee roasters Victrola and Espresso Vivace. As noted above, the beans come in cans rather than the more usual plastic or foil bags. The can is sealed and has a tear top tab for ease of opening. As always, once opened, I transferred the beans to my "BeanVac" to keep them vacuum-sealed and fresh, not that it will take all that long for me to get through a mere half-pound of beans! The beans are mid-brown and dry as would be expected of a medium roast. (Dark roast beans are oily as the extra roasting time starts to "squeeze" the oils from the beans.)

It takes a little extra effort to get good crema production from these beans; I found I had to grind them a little finer than I have been grinding my beans from Vivace and Victrola. Once I did that good crema was produced.

The flavor is a complex combination of bitter and sweet, and it definitely is a roast that is pleasant to drink straight as a straight up espresso shot or short black as it is called in some countries. It also has sufficient punch to make good milk espresso drinks such as lattes, cappuccinos, or flat-whites.

Overall, these are beans that I would recommend, but they are definitely not worth twice the price of the beans from Vivace and Victrola in my opinion, and to my taste, do not have any flavor edge over those beans either. But I will enjoy finishing off the remaining cans.