When I’m newly in love, I tend to hide unattractive facts about myself. This is how I try to make my counterpart fall in love with me more quickly. I’m hiding that as a kid I was in love with Sebastian Krumbiegel from the Princes (that’s the Sams twin). I hide the fact that I like Bifi so much that I always sucked on the plastic. I hide the fact that I have to cry in “Deutschland sucht den Superstar” when the difficult individual fates of the candidates are told in a sensational and tearful manner. And I’m not rubbing my coffee barbarism in the face of the chosen guy: I adore Korean instant coffee.
Common people would describe it as a light brown manure broth that was way too sweet. But that’s a misunderstanding! I want to open hearts to this drink. Short intro: The coffee comes as a mix of instant coffee granules, powdered milk and sugar, packaged in longish sachets tailored to the portion size. The sachet is dissolved in 100ml of hot water and you have a wonderful coffee shot in a few seconds.
A sip of security
Maybe the following question to get you started: What does the first sip of hot chocolate taste like as a child when you come out of the bath with wet hair and something is read to you straight away (in a perfect world)? Exactly, for security. What hot chocolate embodies for many is Korean instant coffee for me. Anyone who has ever been to Korea or likes to watch Korean series knows what kind of coffee I am talking about. There, the yellow bags of a certain brand can be found everywhere, in offices, universities and private homes.
Our author drank instant coffee for the first time at her grandmother’s.
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Image: Ubin Eoh
I myself grew up in Berlin, my parents are from South Korea. As a child, I spent a few summers with my family in Seoul. I drank the instant coffee for the first time with my Halmoni (Korean for grandma). Everything that found its way to my nose from the bustling kitchen of my Halmoni was the pinnacle of deliciousness for me, a culinary enlightenment. Halmoni assumed I didn’t eat rice in the morning – I grew up in the land of rising bread, after all. So I had a large slice of white toast for breakfast. She didn’t have a toaster, but a pan in which she lovingly fried my toast with a ton of butter. When I was old enough, like a teenager, I added a cup of instant coffee. So every morning at six o’clock I woke up to the smell of toasted butter and fresh instant coffee. To date, this is the most effective way of waking me up at this time without Grumpy Cat sitting at the table. I still remember my amazement that coffee can taste so good to me. Admittedly, he is very cute. But it’s more of a shot, a few sips and it’s gone. The milk powder makes it taste slightly caramel.
It is not tied to a time and contains so little caffeine that you can drink it at night without any problems. In Korea there is a culture of drinking coffee at night anyway, many young people meet in cafes at two in the morning instead of in bars. Coffee and sweet snacks to soft K-Pop music and bright lights, only at night. So beautifully idyllic and innocent, I love that. I think it’s a shame that this doesn’t exist in Germany and that all commercial offers here at night always have to be somewhat wicked, i.e. connected with sex, alcohol and cigarettes. A nocturnal ideal world option would be a dream: Hello, market gap!
In Korea, you can also find small supermarkets 24 hours a day, where there is always hot water for ready-made noodle soups or instant coffee. I know that instant products are considered barbaric in this country, and we also find plastic waste among all sows. But the very affordable Korean instant coffee brings happiness to many people. It often costs less than 50 cents from machines. The coffee culture in Korea is as progressive as it is here, but the nice thing is that good old instant coffee is still socially accepted there and accessible to the poor in particular.
That was the idea when it was launched in the 1970s: to offer cheap coffee for everyone. Apart from the plastic waste and climate-damaging aspects of instant culture, I think we can treat ourselves to unintelligent convenience pleasure like the Koreans. “The feeling of shaking such a small bag, tearing it open and putting the powder in a cup feels like a grab bag,” enthuses my sister Katti, she is a patron of the finest. A friend of mine once worked for the Korean company LG, near Frankfurt. He too is absolutely delighted with the instant coffee he used to smuggle out of the LG office kitchen for me. “I celebrate the Koreans’ wonderful way of taking instant products to a high-end level and offering them in so many varieties,” he says. “Meanwhile, instant coffee is available in espresso, latte macchiato and an iced coffee edition! We always drank it with ice in the office in the summer.” It has to be said that he is otherwise a real gourmet.
But other laws apply to Korean instant coffee, you can only take it to your heart. Just yesterday I made myself a pack at home, after a long corona quarantine I just wanted a bit of security. He reminded me of the leisurely breakfast at my Halmoni. At some point Halmoni was too weak to live alone. She came to a hospital, I remember long drives to her with my brother Ugi. Arriving there crumpled up, our first official act was always: first a small instant coffee. We often stood there in silence in the sparse hospital room and sipped apathetically at the sweet bomb. With our eyes closed, we were able to beam ourselves back to Halmoni’s bustling kitchen.
