I recently made a big mistake when buying cheap coffee at the Royal Subic store at the Subic Bay Freeport Zone. I normally buy Nescafé Classic, but the regular jars of it were out-of-stock. The store is in a remodeling phase and food products are being moved around. It's difficult to find what you're looking for, even if you know where it's supposed to be.

The Best Instant Coffee Brands

I don't know why certain brands of instant coffee are made differently from each other. Whether it's coffee powder, freeze-dried coffee, or coffee with coffee crystals makes no difference to me. The best brands I've ever personally consumed are those made by Folgers and Nescafé, regardless of the particular variety.

My parents have been drinking "Taster's Choice" for years (and I obviously leech off of them whenever possible) but it was only recently that I discovered that it was a brand owned by Nescafé and only when they put that word on the label. It didn't used to be there (kind of like when they changed the "Quik" chocolate drink to "NesQuik"). I've been drinking Nescafé and Folgers (instant coffee only) for quite some time myself.

In the Philippines, Nescafé is also the cheapest, good brand of coffee and it's made in the Philippines even though Nescafé is a Swiss product. When I shop for coffee, I normally shop for Nescafé. If it's not available and I can find Folgers coffee on the shelf, I'll opt to buy the Folgers coffee even though it's usually twice as expensive.

The Worst Instant Coffee Brands

When it comes to coffee, you can't substitute a good brand with a generic-sounding brand. You just can't. It will taste like crap compared to what you're used to. Even certain brand name coffees taste like crap compared to what I'm used to.

Maxwell House instant coffee, for example, just doesn't taste good to me. I don't know if it's due to their manufacturing process or if they just use inferior coffee beans. Whatever the case, I don't like it.

On my last shopping trip, I couldn't find the Nescafé varieties or the Folgers coffee anywhere. I ended up buying an offbeat brand called "Sunny Select". It was a big mistake. That coffee tastes like I boiled my socks and tried to make coffee out of the results, it's that bad. Sunny Select makes a lot of food products and lot of it's good, but they have failed when it comes to coffee. I didn't buy this brand because it was cheap coffee. I bought it because it was all that I could find that wasn't Maxwell House.

Automatic Drip Coffee is a Different Story

I don't own an automatic drip coffee maker, but I plan to get one in the next few months as my budget allows. In my past experiences with automatic drip coffee brands, several brands always topped my list. In the case of drip coffee, Maxwell House is actually very good even though their instant coffee sucks.

Folgers is another good drip coffee. You really can't go wrong with Folgers. There are some other brands that I won't touch with a ten-foot pole and the reason is because they aren't 100 percent coffee. Some brands include things like chicory and I want my coffee pure. I like the taste of coffee, not that other nonsense they use to dilute the flavor. When they do something like that, it tells me their coffee beans are inferior to start with.

I've learned a lesson — never settle for second best. If I have to settle for second best from now on, I believe I'd rather do without having any coffee at all.

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The store where I usually get the Kopiko coffee candy recently ran out of the bags in the size that I normally buy. They have a huge bag available for 300 pesos, but I don't want big bags. When my nieces and nephews see a large bag of candy, they won't stop hounding me until it's gone. Their teeth are bad enough as it is and they don't need MORE candy to make them worse (they already eat candy every single day).

The store is on Magsaysay Drive, near the Olongapo City Mall, and the sign says "Circle J" outside (very similar the Circle K stores in the US). Some of the labels and racks inside the store say "J-Mart", so I can only assume they decided to change their name at some point and didn't change all the references. Anyway, since I wanted coffee candy, I decided to buy another brand.

X.O. Coffee Candy

The X.O. Coffee Candy comes under the brand name of "Jack 'n Jill" for the candy division of the Universal Robina Corporation (URC). URC is one of the largest brand food product companies in the Philippines and they have a ton of candies under the "Jack 'n Jill" brand, including candies that resemble cough drops.

I don't know how much a bag of X.O. Coffee Candy costs. I wasn't paying attention, but it's near to the same price as Kopiko. Kopiko is made in Indonesia whereas the X.O. products are all made in the Philippines.

Ingredients

Like Kopiko, X.O. Coffee Candy isn't the healthiest candy to have around. I'll live with the consequences. The ingredients are sugar, glucose syrup, hydrogenated vegetable fat, skimmed milk powder, coffee powder, soya lecithin and iodized salt.

When I see "hydrogenated" on anything, I tend not to buy it or consume it. I've seen and eaten worse and I want my coffee candy, so I'll live with it.

The Taste Test

While a piece of Kopiko coffee candy is a little dark brown square, a piece of X.O. Coffee Candy is oval-shaped and a little thicker. Kopiko comes in bags of 150 grams (the regular size anyway) and X.O. Coffee Candy comes in bags of 175 grams, which means X.O. provides 25 grams more for about the same price.

To be honest, I can't tell the difference in taste. Kopiko is a little stronger in flavor and that's about it. I think I'll be sticking to X.O. Coffee Candy from now on, unless they run out of it as well. In that case, Kopiko is the backup treat.

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Unlike coffee, the many kinds of tea are not produced from multiple species. The different varieties of tea come from one plant, the camellia sinensis. I'm not talking about teas (like herbal tea) which do not come from the tea plant; I'm specifically talking about the varieties made from the tea plant.

Tea is Classified by the Producing Technique

The traditional tea consumed by most Americans is black tea. It's the same plant used for green tea, so green tea isn't any healthier for you than black tea in its original form. Here are the classifications:

• White tea: Un-Wilted and unoxidized
• Yellow tea: Un-wilted and unoxidized but allowed to yellow
• Green tea: Wilted and unoxidized
• Oolong: Wilted, bruised, and partially oxidized
• Black tea: Wilted, crushed, and fully oxidized
• Post-fermented tea: Green Tea that has been allowed to ferment/compost

What about Red Tea?

When my family moved to Hawaii in the 70s, and I was a teenager, my parents planted a unique hedgerow. It was a repeating row in an order than included Tea, Red Tea and Bird of Paradise. The tea plant was the tea plant I'm talking about. The red tea plant is something else. Although it looks like the regular tea plant, it's not red version of it. Frankly, I don't know what it was.

How Tea is Consumed

I've always known about tea being consumed either cold (iced) or hot. The British like it hot, while most Americans like it iced. Unlike coffee, again, tea isn't used in candies and cakes and the leaves aren't eaten with chocolate.

Local Tea Varieties

I'm unaware of any tea that's grown locally. If I look at some of the packaging, I'd probably find out that some of what I think is imported is actually made in the Philippines.

I usually buy the instant NESTEA, without sugar or lemon flavoring added. I like to taste the tea, not the additives. Yes, I add sugar, but how much I add depends on how strong I make it. I like it iced and lightly sweetened, not heavily sweetened like the US southerners.

Unfortunately for me, most Filipinos like the added lemon, so the plain NESTEA is always hard to find.

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