Be Excellent To Each Other

Try various beans depending on your taste. Personally, I like a strong, but rounded taste, so tend to blend the rich dark bitter beans with milder ones. You can even add things like nutmeg or cinnamon to the grind.

Have a play.

I suspect that most people can't drink water that's close to 100 degrees. Adding cold milk is fine as well, provided it isn't mashed potato ;o)

OKi my brainy other half has answered this with -

read Williams-Landel-Ferry theory and food polymer science

Tell her she's more than welcome to come to the BeexBeeTwo (along with you, I guess) and demonstrate the applicable theories by keeping our beer cold in the most efficient fashion.

To get the best from tea you need the water to be as hot as possible. Ideally, pour the water into the mug with the tea bag in it as soon as it comes to the boil. Stir, and leave it to steep for a couple of minutes. This allows the tea to brew properly, brings out a full flavour and breaks down the bitterness of the tannins. After brewing, the tea has cooled enough not to scald the milk. It also means you can start to take nice big swigs of the stuff straight away and it is still pleasing hot. (If you don't allow it to brew for a while, it's too hot to drink and you have to take what I like to call 'little-burny-lippy-sips'.) You then add milk and sugar. I take a small splosh of milk in my tea if it is robust black tea, like traditional English breakfast, Earl Grey, Assam or Chai. Milk does not belong in more delicate, fragrant varieties. I almost always take a heaped spoonful of sugar and struggle without it, which I admit is a mild heresy. People who add milk first don't know what they are doing and probably inherited the habit from their Hyacinth Bucket-esque grandmother or something. Tea made by these people is almost always a horrible, pale, milky facsimile of the real thing.

I take tea quite seriously. Tea and beer. Like every good Briton should.

I buy loose tea from these guys and when at home I brew it in a cafetiere.

http://www.highteas.co.uk/.

I like water on instant coffee first then I add milk. I like a lot of milk in my coffee. Lovely creamy coffee. Mmmm.

As a regular instant coffee drinker, the true answer is milk first, and lots of it.
You can totally taste the difference, a just boiled kettle makes it taste bitter instead of smooth. This is why every jar will say 'do not use boiling water' or equivalent.
Here's the science bit...
The taste change occurs if the coffee is >90 degrees.
Just boiled water poured in will heat the coffee above this, which then gets cooled by the cup & milk to 60 degrees or so.
Adding milk first means the coffee is heated from 5 degrees in the milk up to 60 odd degrees, and never goes near the 90 zone, so you get the full flavour without the bitterness.
It does require some extra stirring, but to ensure proper sugar dissolution, then you should be stirring vigorously anyway.

My instant coffee is really rubbish at dissolving. I find it even worse if I add milk first.

Turn kettle on, stick instant coffee in mug. Have piss. Pour water into mug, add cereal to bowl. Add milk to both. Read Beex. Shave, shower, another cupof coffee, thought for the day, leave for work.

This happens with grounds, sure. Extracting coffee flavour from grounds is a factor of time, pressure, and temperature. So a drip coffee maker, say, (where time and pressure is a constant) will yield over-extracted coffee if the temperature is higher. This tastes bitter, because the sugars and acids are extracted from the grounds first, then the bitters come out more slowly. The higher the temperature, the more bitters (but the amount of sugars and acids remains constant).

But that doesn't apply to instant coffee. You're just dissolving a fixed amount of flavoursome granules in a fixed amount of water. Temperature can't change anything unless its hot enough to cause something to breakdown, chemically, in the granules. Which I'm pretty sure it's not.

Plus, if you tip 100 deg C water into a ceramic mug, it's below 90 in scant seconds anyway. Mugs have a lot of thermal ballast.

You're talking about interesting organic compounds which could denature at moderate temperatures - many interesting cooking reactions occur just below 100 to give various flavours. Either some of the sweet sugars are getting broken, or a long chain wotsit has a bit fall off & this changes it to a bitter tasting acid.

It definitely tastes bitterererer if you put the water in first (personal anecdata)
I suspect the same would be true if you took nice fresh coffee, filtered out any residual solids, and then heated it to over 90 degrees (which will be what effectively happens as decent instant coffee is just freeze dried filter coffee).

Late info... The missus did organic chemistry at uni, and her response is yes, you do get changes based purely on temperature. It was fairly common when doing complex organic synthesis that you had to add reagants at specific temeratures (too low and the reaction doesn't start, too high and the molecules break down).
As an example of flavour change, if you dunk strawberries in hot water (>90 degrees), they will taste like the strawberry flavour in jam rather than fresh strawberries. I think this needs verifying tho if anyone wants to try it...

I don't know about the science but I've definitely also noticed that instant coffee tastes off if you pour boiling water on it with no milk in first. Incidentally I've had to stop having sugar in brews at work at all now because if there isn't any then people put fucking sweeteners in instead despite my clear instructions to the contrary. Honestly what the fuck is wrong with someone that they can think those things taste in any way ok. They might just as well say "oh sorry we've run out of sugar so I just shat in it instead".

Not quite coffee, but related. We discovered something at wrok yesterday - Putting ribena in cold tea and then microwaving it leads to.... less than pleasant results.

Mmm, Congealed goo.

why would you try that?!

Dom -- sure, you get all sorts of organic molecules that break down at various temperature bands. I'm just not convinced there are any of them in coffee.

I've read a fair bit about coffee making over the years (there's tons on the Internet), and I've never seen anyone talk about breakdown -- just over-extraction.

I've just checked the long coffee section in McGee and he doesn't mention anything about it either. He does point out that percolators operate "at the boil", those little Italian metal coffepot things at 115 deg C, and espresso machine at 93 deg C. He also states that instant coffee is brewed twice; once "near the boil" for aroma, then again at 170 deg C (under pressure) to extract pigments and "body-producing carbohydrates". Then comes the hot spray-drying or freeze drying process.

He does note that prolonged high heat "accelerates chemical reactions and the escape of volatile molecules" and that fresh-brewed coffee should therefore be held for less than an hour at close-to-brewing temperature.

Overall, I'm not convicted by your anecdote. I think we need some double blind ABX testing

Mind that some tannins bind proteins & the like though.

Also: coffee beans are roasted, to 150-200 deg C, before coffee is brewed. How would these delicate flavour chemicals survive that, but then be broken down by exposure to 100 deg C in your mug?

Decent overview of the instant coffee brewing process here : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant_coffee#Production also mentions the brew water is 155-180 deg C.

I didn't try it, I just suggested it as a joke. And filmed the consequences.

More specifically, my work chum bought some strange flavour of Ribena, found he didn't like it and has been searching for ways to use it that he likes. This one... didn't work. Next week, milkless tea with ribena.

I find that instant coffee does taste different if you add the water hot directly to the granules, but only if the coffee has been open for a period of time. It is most likely, I also find that you can get this flavour without using boiling water on old coffee granules. So most likely there is an degradation process going on over the life of the coffee grounds.

Also, this thread makes me want coffee.

Bought a cafetiere today. Had a coffee machine for ages but rarely use it because it is a hassle to clean. Wasn't sure what grounds to buy but Sainsbury's had an offer on Taylors so I went with a level 3 Sunday morning roast and Hot Lava Java, a level 6 I bought because I liked the name. Just brewed my first cup of the Lava Java and oh my goodness it is gorgeous! Has anyone else tried it? I was worried it might taste too strong but it is delicious! I might be jangling a wee bit afterwards though, based on the caffeine content!

I fucking love Hot Lava Java. Like you I was expecting it to be harshly powerful, but it's not, it's just a really lovely flavourful coffee.

I'm really surprised, I think when I think of really strong coffee I think of it being overpowering and bitter but this really well rounded, a deep coffee flavour rather than a smack in the face.
I'm also going to get an Indian for dinner tonight so since I'm driving super strong coffee I shall also have to come on here and boast at my attempts eating a super spicy curry.

Heh, I had just found a review that started like Dimrill et al.

My tape measure is the longest in the world.

No wonder SisterCrumpet married you. Do you trip over it often?