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Comment by TheArcane | Hacker News Reader

So the author was so opposed to preparing coffee at home (or anything in his kitchen, like he admitted) that he managed to kick a lifelong addiction? This compounded by his claimed of being an addict rather than an afficianado (so he could prettiest much consume home made instant or drip coffee) makes me question the severity of his claimed addiction.

To be clear, I congratulate the authors for kicking the addiction, but the story seems a bit ludicrous.

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Instant coffee isn't even that bad. And that Korean whipped coffee has been making the social media rounds, it doesn't take much in resources or gadgets to make.

I wonder if it's maybe a cultural thing. Where I grew up in the United States it would be almost unheard of not to own a coffee pot. But I've also worked with people (from parts of Asia, in particular) where they didn't know how to operate a drip coffee maker and only kept instant around, despite how much coffee they would drink every day.

When I was an expat in Japan, I was quite taken with the design of the single serve pour over coffee packets that were sold nearly everywhere. Each packet contained a folded origami filter that was itself filled with ready to brew ground coffee. So to make pour over coffee, all you had to do was unfold the filter, place it over a single cup, and pour some boiling water over it. That’s it — no other equipment required, not even a pour over cone! Far better tasting than instant, although it generated a bit more waste. Granted, it assumes the presence of an electric kettle, but nearly every household has one of those.

Here’s a video of one in use to better illustrate the concept: https://youtu.be/Q1nkDoNcMRc

It's definitely at least a contingent thing. I was completely fine with instant coffee in college, nowadays I can't stand it. (Would I like it if it weren't labeled - I dunno, I haven't done a blinded trial.)

The best instant coffee tastes like reheated coffee from the previous day, for what it's worth

I think you get used to it. I switched to tea years ago but when I accidentally drank a mouthful of my wife's instant coffee recently it tasted foul.

If it hadn't been for COVID-19, which was a logistically unbelievably stressful time, I would've probably purchased a coffee maker. (There was a coffee machine in my building that I used frequently, but the building made it inaccessible due to perceived COVID contamination risks.) But dealing with tons of COVID fallout, that just didn't make it to the top of my priority list.

I use the word "addict" loosely -- I'm not sure how much real chemical dependency there was, I didn't have much in the way of withdrawal symptoms. I have anecdotally observed that people have radically different biological responses to and dependencies on caffeine. I think my "addiction" was mostly cultural.

Reminded me of those stories of war people taking drugs because the environment triggered the desire in them.

If being outside was the trigger, staying inside would make it easy to quit. On the other hand, going outside again would trigger again the addiction, so it never went away in the first place.

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