The Best Instant Coffees (2024): Tested and Reviewed | WIRED

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There is no coffee preparation method more widely maligned than instant coffee. Even its name conjures up memories of bitter, acrid coffee that tastes too thin and too thick all at once. It's the province of motel lobbies, red-eye flights, and 5 am commutes. But it's also one of the most popular ways to drink coffee.

There's more to the world of instant coffee than a packet of Folgers crystals dissolving at the bottom of a Styrofoam cup. About half the world even prefers it to other coffee preparation methods, and there's a good reason for that: Most of the world is getting pretty good instant coffee. Indonesia, Japan, China, Mexico, Colombia, and Cuba all have instant coffee products on their shelves that can seriously rival the rich, flavorful brew you get from fresh beans. So, to find out which of these crystals actually gives your fresh-roasted, home-ground coffee a run for its money, I've been drinking my way across the world to find the best instant coffees.

Be sure to check our other coffee guides, including the Best Espresso Machines, Best Cold-Brew Coffee Makers, Best Coffee Grinders, Best French Presses, and Best Electric Kettles.

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You will always get more depth and breadth of flavor out of a cup of coffee ground and brewed fresh, the same way a loose-leaf tea will be more flavorful than even the most thoughtfully prepared tea bags. But when testing instant coffees, I wasn't looking for coffees that reproduced the fresh-brewed flavor profile or drinking experience. That's a trap coffee lovers fall into when drinking instant coffee. It's a different medium than fresh-brewed coffee—like comparing a watercolor to an oil painting. Each has things it does well, but they don't both do the same things well.

The coffees on this list each provided memorable and enjoyable drinking experiences. Instant coffees that are made well shine a spotlight on a coffee's fruity flavor notes, tartness, and roasty warm flavors like cinnamon and caramel. It can be difficult to find whole-bean coffees that produce these flavors when freshly roasted. Instant coffees that don't try to be something else are, in my experience, the best-tasting. The ones trying too hard to replicate the fresh-roast experience are what end up tasting weak, too astringent, and full of off flavors. They're pale imitations because they're exactly that: imitations.

Colcafe's instant coffee crystals produce a cup of coffee that's robust, flavorful, bold, and not overly bitter. It tastes like a good-quality dark roast blend; that kind of reliable, everyday cup of coffee that warms you right through. It's one of the better dark roasts I've had recently. It's smoky without being acrid, and the flavor brings to mind campfires with fresh-cut wood. There's a caramel note that blends with the smokiness to make it almost taste like a toasted marshmallow.

I don't like bitter flavors. I never have. I can tolerate and appreciate them, and note them present in a coffee or a beer's bouquet of flavors. But Colcafe's instant coffee is pleasantly bitter. A bitter tang at the end of every sip adds to the whole drinking experience, like a contrasting note resolving itself at the end of a verse.

Unsweetened.

Trung Nguyen's G7 3-in-1 instant coffee is an absolute dream. It includes sugar and nondairy creamer powder in its mix, so you can make this one with just hot water and be good to go. The coffee it produces is full-bodied and tastes almost like cocoa, with notes of nutmeg and malt.

There's a nuttiness I've never tasted in an instant coffee. Lighter, more delicate flavors are usually lost in the processing stages, which is why so many instant coffees taste bold and dark. But it has notes of hazelnut that ring clear as a bell through the warm, roasty flavors. It's amazing. This one is also incredible as an ice cream topping. Sprinkle some of the coffee powder over vanilla or chocolate ice cream and it's a sort of deconstructed affogato. Don't even get me started on how good it is with whipped cream.

Lightly sweetened. Includes powdered nondairy creamer.

Nescafe Gold doesn't look like other instant coffees. It's a finer powder, almost like flour. When you pour hot water over a spoonful, the coffee creates a little crema and smells remarkably like fresh espresso.

On first taste, it's close to the intense complexity a freshly pulled shot of espresso brings to the party. You're hit with a tang of bitterness followed by a wave of roasted warm flavors. It has notes of caramel and hazelnut, plus a fleeting floral flavor that shows up after the first sip. If you're looking for an instant espresso that tastes like espresso, this is easily the one to get.

Unsweetened, produces a crema-like experience.

Café de olla is a Mexican coffee drink traditionally prepared in a big clay pot or olla. It's usually a blend of milk, piloncillo (a solid cone of unrefined sugar, a lot like jaggery), cinnamon sticks, and a few big scoops of instant coffee. The resulting drink is rich, silky, and indulgent. The bitterness of the instant coffee offsets the sweetness of the piloncillo, and the milk and cinnamon bring the whole thing together into a cup that tastes like nothing else.

There are quite a few different recipes and styles throughout Central and South America, and several different companies make instant coffee versions of café de olla. This one, from Amorcito, is the absolute best of the bunch. It contains the piloncillo and cinnamon already so once you add milk (steamed milk works great), you have a single serving of café de olla all to yourself. It has notes of caramel, chocolate, and honey.

Sweetened, includes cinnamon flavor.

UCC's The Blend 117 is a Japanese instant coffee and one of the best I've tried. With some hot water, Blend 117's light brown crystals become a dark, caramel-colored cup of coffee. The smell will hit you first, filling your nose with bold notes of Dutch-processed baking chocolate.

It's strong and assertive but not overly bitter, with an undeniable chocolate flavor that almost tastes like hot cocoa. Blend 117 is perfect for sipping with or without milk or sugar.

Unsweetened.

Unlike most instant coffees, Cometeer coffee (8/10, WIRED Recommends) isn't a powder. It's a concentrate. It's brewed, freeze-dried, and packed into a little aluminum pod. The resulting iced coffee cylinder just needs hot water to become a cup of rich, flavorful coffee.

I especially like these for iced “espresso” drinks in the afternoon. Just take a pod out, put it on your counter, and in 15 minutes or so it'll be melted. Pour it over ice, add some milk, and you've got an iced latte. If you're feeling fancy, shake it with ice in a cocktail shaker for an extra-smooth, creamy, café-quality iced latte.

There are a lot of instant coffee blends in the world. Even in an American supermarket, you're faced with a dizzying array of instant coffee options. But step into an H-Mart or Mercado and you're faced with even more. That means there's a lot of overlap. A lot of the instant coffees on those shelves are pretty good, but they might not stand out the way others do. That's what this list is for: cataloging the instant coffees we genuinely liked, but that didn't quite beat out one of our other picks.

Café Bustelo for $10: A classic, Bustelo has a roasty flavor with notes of brown sugar and roast grain, and makes for an excellent cup of coffee—with or without cream. It didn't quite beat out Colcafe or Blend 117 as a black coffee that kept me coming back.

Nescafe's Café de Olla for $7: It was a close race, but Amorcito's café de olla beat out Nescafe for one reason: Nescafe's cinnamon flavor. It's a little too artificial. As a cup of coffee, it's bold and roasty, with notes of molasses and honey, but the artificiality of the cinnamon flavoring dominates all those other flavors.

Instant coffee goes through a lot of processing before it makes its way to your pantry. It's picked, dried, roasted, converted to instant coffee crystals, packaged, and shipped. At each step, flavors are washed away, burnt to a crisp, or lost to the ether. These are the coffees that lost too much of their essence on that journey, leaving us with coffee that was either undrinkable or off-putting.

AGF Maxim Instant Coffee for $9: This one might be an acquired taste. I can imagine someone enjoying it, but that someone isn't me. It produced a cup of coffee that tasted bitter and burnt—practically carbonized.

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