GothIron

Gothiron.......? Don't I know that name...
Rants from the past revived

Some Like It Hot

Surely I haven’t succumbed to get another gimmicky product, Gothiron can’t be that gullible, can she?

The short answers are yes and no. Yes, I firmly believe that coffee in a can is a gimmick, No, this wasn’t an impulse buy. I had actively searched this out for 3 reasons: it’s freezing watching football, coffee in a thermos is vile and West Ham’s beverage providers have a unique perspective on delivery: battle through mass of seemingly gigantic men clutching lagers, wait forever to get a cup of Kenco Instant for £1.10, navigate way back to seat through said heaving throng who are determinedly ignoring frantic attempts of short, dumpy woman to get pass whilst clutching remnants of coffee in badly scalded mitt and miss the opening ten minutes of a game. It’s A Knockout couldn’t have come up with a better game, you can almost hear Stuart Hall having a coronary through laughter!

So a self-heating can of coffee looked a good bet, a sci-fi concept available to us mere mortals. The product is allegedly available in black, white with sugar and white without sugar and I have a feeling that the rollout in this country must be still in early trial stages as my local supermarkets don’t stock them and there doesn’t seem to be any mention on the Nescafe UK website of these novelties. Fortunately, the petrol station near work does have them although not the black coffee version. As this “trial” was going to involve a co-tester (my footie mad Mum), I got one With and one Without Sugar to cater for all tastes.

Freezing football day arrived and the excitement built, yes it was almost half time and I could test the coffees.

Remembering past experiences with not reading instructions properly, I doubled checked what I was meant to do and followed the instructions to the letter:

Turn unopened can upside and check that the vivid red liquid in it's own plastic well at the bottom can is still in liquid form and the “reactor” button hadn't been pushed.

Push button to start the heating process and shake the can until the liquid disappears, this takes about 30 seconds.

Wait for three minutes, during this time you should hear a “pop” which indicates the heating process is happening.

Pull back the ring pull, and enjoy your hot and steaming coffee. Yeah, right.

First thing that struck co-tester was that it wasn’t hot, or even very warm. In fact tepid would have been a generous way to describe the initial temperature. Whilst this discussion was taking place and I was debating not even bothering with the second can, we noticed that the can was still getting hotter and so was the coffee. Five minutes after opening the can, the coffee was now hot enough to drink. Co-testers verdict was that it certainly beat thermos coffee, tasted like decent coffee if a bit weak but was quite bitter (this was the Without Sugar option) but smelt just like normal instant coffee.

Repeated with “With Sugar” option, but decided to wait until the can felt hot before pulling back the ringpull and this gave a better result temperature-wise. For a product that is badged as With Sugar, it wasn’t very sweet but was still pleasant enough to drink for me. If you really like sweet coffee, I think you’d struggle a bit with this one.

The one major drawback is the amount of actual coffee you get. These cans are the same size as a Coke can but hold only 220mls of liquid. To give you a comparison, Coke cans are 330mls, so most of the coffee can is taken up with the heating mechanism. Considering that these cost me £1.15, they are pricey when compared with the £1.10 that I would pay for a bigger cup at the ground. The cans actually weigh more when the coffee was been drunk then when unopened (due to the heating element inside now being solid) which makes it hard to work out whether there is another dribble left in there after all.

The other gripe I have is that for an instant product, it takes a while to get to the desired temperature (or even to a reasonable temperature)and I did feel a bit of a berk swishing a can around to make it heat up.

One happy side effect is that the can stays hot for about 15 minutes after the drink is finished, which provides a very effective handwarmer for those of us not lucky enough to remember to pick up gloves as well as scarf! In fact I should imagine the whole heating technology for these cans is based around the same principle as the instant handwarmers you can buy which heat up when you snap the button.

Are you meant to take cans into football? I asked a steward this and was told “the only thing we’ll confiscate would be glass bottles” so, no problems there then and I’m hardly likely to be able to scald anyone with the contents!

Verdict:

As this was bought to avoid the need for me to battle my way through crowds to get a hot drink, not burn my hands with said hot drink or have to drink vile thermos coffee, then it does get the thumbs up from me as fulfilling all the criteria I was looking for., although I’m not totally convinced that the product in it’s current state is going to be around for that long.

Would I buy it again?

I think this is going to be relegated (very freudian for your average WHU fan) to the “only when it’s likely to be really freezing” category of use as they represent poor value for money and don’t contain enough coffee for my liking. It is also a pretty odd for a product that seems ideal for outdoor use to have the comments “better when activated at room temperature” on it.

The surrounding supporters were duly impressed by the idea of coffee in a can, agreed that this was the innovative approach that West Ham needed and it certainly provided more talking points than the first half v Leicester!