Avoid the motorway! (Nescafe Hot When You Want)

Member Name: Boonoiy

Product:	Nescafe Hot When You Want
Date:	04/10/02 (353 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Great packaging, A trusted name, Much better than the usual cafe coffee

Disadvantages: Bit of a weird sensation - coffee out of a can, Bit on the expensive side for what you get

Picture the scene - a family birthday up North, me and my brother on our way up the motorway with my girlfriend in the back and a great weekend planned. Yep, the journey to the North was set to be a good 'un. My first motorway driving experience, the happy sounds of Jimmy Buffet on the radio and a smile on all 3 off our faces. Well up for fun.

A stop.

A quick pee and a KFC, a trip to the petrol station and then back on the road again for the 2nd leg of the journey.

Hmmmm? What's this? Coffee in a can? Sounds good.

Buy coffee.

Activate.

Scald all and sundry for the next 5 miles!

Not, and let me repeat this, NOT the easiest of drinks to manage in a car at 70 (ish...) miles per hour.

So, we'll get on to some semblance of order to the op shall we? What's all the fuss about? What's up with a simple flask of coffee then? Well there's the pain as we all drink in shattered shards of glass with the tepid, horrible, never the correct sweetness and usually quite weak too, coffee. I have not used a flask in years.

The product:
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Firstly there's the packaging. Very pretty, very nice looking and easily noticed. I saw this for the first time in said petrol station and was intrigued straight away. A big display and all sorts of shouting and hoo-haa about its various virtues. I thought I'd give it a try (see how advertising and product placement works?). It's obviously a Nescafe product so I knew I was buying a tried and tested coffee.

The price: I paid £1.10 for my can (it's not really a can I suppose, more of a plastic cup with a ring-pull but we'll say can for convenience sake, mind you saying that I've just removed the convenience totally by adding this comment, and even further by trying to explain the lack of convenience and NOW WOULD YOU LOOK WHAT I'VE DONE!!!!!!!!!!!!!! AAARGH It's all to
o much for a Friday!) but I've heard they can go up as far as £2.00 if you're at certain sporting events (keep far away from Ascot folks if you want to keep your cash safe!)

The activation: Easy peasy. Lovely stuff. To turn your can of cold coffee into a can of piping hot joy you need to follow a couple of very simple steps - 1. Break the seal on the heating liquid by pressing in the button on the base of the can. Red liquid will then become evident and you'll feel the beginning of the heating process. 2. Shake vigorously for about 30 seconds. All well and good, the coffee is beginning to turn hot and you're ready to go.

Open it up as you would a coke can and drink carefully as it gets VERY hot. I found that it still heated after I'd opened the can and went on doing so for about 5 minutes. Cue the pain and dropping incidents that then ensued!

Taste: Probably the most important thing when buying a coffee or any hot/cold beverage/foodstuff and the thing that's really going to get you going back for more. Hot When You Want comes, apparently, in 3 guises - there's the black (never seen this), the white (most prominent) and the white with sugar (not as elusive as the black but not all over the place as the white is). Being a sugar taker and fancying the stuff I got the white with sugar can and went about my business. Once I got over the idea of it being really weird that I was drinking out of a can and it was RED HOT I started to think of the taste itself. Now, I like my coffee good and strong, weak is not for me thanks a lot! Unfortunately weak was what I got (at least in my opinion) and not quite as sweet as I usually have my coffee. Saying that, I was quite happy with the taste all in all, it was a lot better than most roadside cafe's coffee, certainly much better than anything that Little Chef have ever served up to me and I managed to enjoy (that which was not soaking into our car's upho
lstery) my piping hot beverage quite well. It has a lovely coffee-shop smell to it that gets the taste buds going in anticipation.

Overall thoughts:
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The can is not huge, I found that the heating mechanism took away a lot of room for the liquid and so I was a little disappointed in that. Felt I was getting ripped off a bit at £1.10 but then again, without the mechanism it'd just be cold coffee and who wants that eh?

Nescafe have made us a product here with quite an appeal, the packaging in nice, the taste is adequate and the coffee comes out at an entirely appropriate temperature. It's a good little idea, it works and is a lot better than carrying a dopey flask about to shatter and spoil the drink.

I think I'll be buying this again, not for home use by any stretch of the imagination but a good idea for something in the packed lunch box for long trips. I'll just have to get my brother to slow down when I'm drinking it in his car! Some hope.

Thanks for reading folks.

Boon ;¬)

Summary: