This May Be the Best Instant Coffee You Can Buy. But Should You?

Instant coffee gets a bad rap. But what historically conjured up images of soluble coffee granules that taste like dirt has come a long way in the last five years. From Jot, which makes a coffee concentrate, to Dripkit, which makes on-the-go pour-over coffee setups, the instant coffee market is more diverse than ever. Cometeer offers yet another path to instant coffee through a frozen coffee pod.

The gist is simple: the company brews coffee (with specialty-grade beans from an impressive roster of coffee roasters), then immediately freezes it with liquid nitrogen. The frozen puck of coffee comes in K-cup-style pods. To brew, pop out the frozen coffee disk and melt with hot water for a cup of joe. Cometeer offers up a few ways to use its pods from making iced lattes to espresso martinis. And yes, you can even use a pod-brewing coffee machine, though you could more easily pour hot water over the frozen disk manually.

Cometeer

Cometeer’s landing page reads, “A new day has arrived on Earth for coffee.” That said, its coffee comes in pods, a receptacle criticized for being detrimental to the environment.

To be clear, the company does pods better than most. Its pods are made of aluminum capsules and are curbside-recyclable, as in there’s no need to haul bags full of pods to some recycling center to properly rid of the waste.

Take a Keurig pod, for example; it’s 90 percent recyclable (the other 10 percent being the lid and coffee grounds). While Cometeer is fully recyclable, that doesn’t mean it will actually be recycled. As many have reported, just because you throw recyclables into the recycling bin, they’ll probably just end up in another landfill.

From farm to cup, a lot can go wrong in the coffee chain to turn your morning cup of joe into another blow to Mother Nature. But with brands like Cometeer going the extra step to make coffee better for coffee drinkers and the environment, at least we’re moving in the right direction. We first reported on Cometeer in early 2019 after the product was voted one of the best products shown at the Specialty Coffee Expo by a panel of Expo judges. While Cometeer is still not available to the public — the brand says it’ll officially land in 2021 — we’ll continue to keep an eye out on the brand’s journey to launch.

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