Home › Food Drinks and Fun Drinks › G. Washington Instant Coffee
G. Washington Instant Coffee
G. Washington makes such excellent coffee in the shake of a lamb's tail that for anybody who can pay a dime for 3 cups, there's no reason to take any other kind of coffee along. You can carry a supply of "aces" in your pocket, enough to make one cup or a score and be glad that you can leave the bulky, black-bottomed old coffee pot at home. Use good water, from a pure spring, if possible, boil it freshly in an open pan to free it from air, clip off the soft metal top of the "ace," dump your jiffy coffee powder into cup, dipper or empty bean can and there you are, all set with a steaming cup of Java without any waste of time or coffee in the grounds to be thrown away, because there ain't no grounds! And that's grounds enough for using it! For canoe or auto trips you can take a thermos full of hot water along and make a fresh cup whenever you feel the need of it, because you don't have to use boiling hot water with instant coffee, just water of the right drinking temperature, however hot or cold you like your coffee. And the light and dark broths made in the same way from vegetable bouillon aces are a natural for outdoor thirsts.
Less a recipe than a method, and the method still works — only the packaging has changed. G. Washington's brand is long gone, but any single-serve instant coffee stick behaves the same way.
- What an "ace" wasA sealed single-serving tube of instant coffee powder with a soft metal tip you snipped or twisted off. The modern equivalent is a paper or foil stick pack, or roughly one rounded teaspoon of loose instant per cup.
- The dime for three cupsA price point from the era when this was written, not a guide to anything current. Judge quantity by the cup, not by the coin.
- Boiling to "free it from air"An old belief about dissolved air spoiling the cup. If anything, driving off dissolved gases tends to flatten the taste rather than improve it, and prolonged boiling in an open pan concentrates whatever minerals the water carries. Bring water just to the boil and stop there.
- Water temperatureThe advice here is sound: instant coffee dissolves fully in water well below boiling, so thermos water at drinking temperature gives a perfectly good cup. Ground coffee cannot be brewed that way in any useful time, which is the point of the comparison.
- Spring waterUntreated spring or stream water should be filtered or boiled before drinking regardless of what you dissolve in it. If you are using thermos water at drinking temperature, fill the thermos from a treated supply.
- Vegetable bouillon acesThe same brand sold powdered broth in identical tubes. Substitute a bouillon cube or a teaspoon of instant stock powder per cup; these run salty, so start with less than the packet suggests.
- VesselThe "empty bean can" is doing real work on a camp trip — instant coffee needs no filtration, so anything that holds hot liquid will serve. Modern cans are lined; empty, rinse and avoid setting them directly on coals.
Instant coffee in a sealed single-serving tube was the product of George Constant Louis Washington, a Belgian-born inventor whose company was based in Brooklyn and who patented a soluble coffee process in the years before the First World War, marketing it under his own conveniently presidential name. The brand's reputation was made in the trenches, where American soldiers are generally said to have called a cup simply "a cup of George," and it carried that association into the interwar decades as camping, motoring and canoe touring turned into mass pastimes. This entry belongs to that second life: the appeal is not flavour so much as the abolition of the coffee pot, the grounds and the wet mess at the bottom of a pack. The G. Washington line changed hands in the 1940s and disappeared from shelves within a couple of decades, by which time instants from much larger companies had taken over the market it had helped create.