Americanos, I Miss You

Not to be a hater but Korea loves bad coffee. I thought that finally, five years down the road, the coffee snobbery instilled by my employment at Peet's Coffee & Tea had finally died. It has not. I realize that until this point I've been living in an insular community of coffee appreciators.

In Korea, the coffee of choice is Maxim.

They come in little sticks of instant coffee crystals and a shit ton of sugar and dehydrated creamer. The particular one pictured here is mocha flavored.

There are starbucks and espresso everywhere in Seoul, too. But I don't like Americanos enought to pay $4 for them (I mean, come on, it's mostly water anyway).

I admit, I am starting to enjoy the coffee here, though. I'll never like Maxim coffee sticks but my school has a coffee machine that makes supersweet mini lattes. They call this coffee but hey, potato, potahto, right?

I'll sound ignorant but before I came here I had assumed Koreans would have similar flavor palettes to my Chinese friends who don't really like sweet things. However, I've found the reverse - Koreans love sweets. I don't think Koreans actually like bad coffee, they just really like sugar and don't have much appreciation for bitter flavors. Wine isn't big here either (though this maybe more because of affordability and market dominance of soju). Most foreign foods taste sweeter here, even the ones that aren't necessarily supposed to (spaghetti sauce? garlic bread??).