A few weeks ago, we vowed to work our way through the supermarket coffee aisles in search of the best brews you can buy in a can. We got through three cans for roughly $5 a pop: Cafe Bustelo (rich, but acrid when made too strong), Martinson’s (ugh) and Maxwell House dark roast (my personal fave) before losing our will to live altogether and giving up. I know it sounds lame to abort mission, but no. Never again. Some things are sacred, and for me, decent coffee is one of them. If you’re in that camp too, the money you save by buying Proctor & Gamble joe is not worth the existential doom induced by one less reason to wake up in the morning, one more mass-produced, tasteless product in your life in place of a simple pleasure you genuinely cherish.

But if it’s Café Bustelo you genuinely enjoy — a number of you said you do — that’s cool too. Not me. A lot of Brokelyn readers also swear by Trader Joe’s beans, and I happened to find a deal at Whole Foods of all unexpected places: their cans of house brand whole bean coffee are $4.99 for 12 oz., which comes out to around $7 a pound. So what indulgences can’t you live with out? Wine? Lipstick? Spotify premium?

Even the most committed brokavore has an achilles heel. Schmancy ice cream, farm raised this or that, deep-fried anchovy skeletons. Mine is coffee: oily, aromatic, dark roast, whole bean, utter, hopeless snobbery. I’m so pathetic I recently bought a junky little milk frother to elevate the experience. But after running out of the good stuff for the first time in my adult life this week, it was time to suck it up and embark upon a long-overdue Brokelyn taste test: supermarket coffees. (more…)