In the early to mid nineties I worked in Tokyo outer suburbs on and off for a bit - working ridiculous hours. One fond-in-retrospect memory is in the late evening or early AM hours going up to a vending machine on the train platform, getting a nice hot can of coffee and sticking it and my hands in my coat pockets to keep warm until the train got there. Then once in the heated carriage cracking it open and drinking it to keep me awake for the ride back to the hotel.
They used to make hot drinks really hot just for the purpose you mentioned, but in the last few years they are just lukewarm to save money on electricity
I guess also to avoid bodily harm. Iirc the famous hot-coffee lawsuit (about a woman suing mc donalds because the coffee was too hot), was because it was much hotter than it needed to be, which gave her 2nd (3rd?) degree burns (also I think the lid wasn't correctly attached?) and she hat to pay >$10000 in hospital bills.
Thanks to you comment I finally know why the coffee was so hot in the first place.
Well one time I broke a tooth. Using my little Japanese/English phrase book I told the concierge at my hotel who took me to a local dentist. The dentist whacked a temporary filling in and via the concierge's rudimentary English told me to get it fixed when I got home.
The only thing he said to me directly, and with no trace of an accent mind you, was, "Open wide, please."
My roommate through all of college was a man from Taiwan. We were and still are good friends. He started dating a girl from Japan around our Sophomore year and the next thing I knew our room was full of cases of canned coffee.
Turns out the girl's father had tried to start up an export business shipping cans of coffee to the US. Didn't work, but my roommate loved it so his girlfriend off-loaded all of it on him, after her father had done the same to her.
This would probably work now... hot canned coffee in airports, specifically, as the Starbucks are always backed up and never open for the very early or very late flights. I would target the major international airports first.
Also my kid is really into Ramune as a soda. Even our almost "rural" edge of the metro supermarket is carrying it.
I think airports work on a concession model where companies essentially bid to get a spot there, like a mall food court. So the business model is to get a monopoly and then sell overpriced crap, which doesn't lend itself to innovation and makes the market hard to break in to.
I agree it would be awesome to be able to get it at the airport.
This is changing, slowly - airport leaders today recognize the value of innovation for customer experience and are making moves where possible to back out of such models, plus welcoming local business, although the difficulties of operating in an airport environment does still lend the environment to larger players, or smaller ones operating through a middleman. KATL and KMSP are two that come to mind for me. Entrepeneurs should definitely consider reaching out to airports that are locally managed - often their hands are tied due to contracts, but those will time out someday.
Perhaps my favorite small channel on YouTube is an indie musician who travels through rural Japan to visit noodle vending machines, accompanied by his own smooth elevator jazz. The vibes are out of this world.
Only Japan can pull it off. In Europe I pretty much never used vending machines as they are so gross and dirty. Even in "clean" countries like Austria or Germany they are like that.
That's a surprise to me. Having lived and travelled across Eastern, Central and Western Europe a lot I never considered vending machines gross. The first vending machine I ever saw must have been a coca cola (or pepsi) vending machine in my primary school 30+ years ago. Then my high school too had a coca cola vending machine and then they were everywhere.
As they became more popular I started seeing them on gas/petrol stations, rail stations and many other places.
However, the kind of machines I talk about always dispense cold cans, sweets, crisps, sometimes packaged yoghurt, but never hot stuff.
Any time I encounter a hot vending machine they are always within some establishment like a gas station where you're supposed to pay first, you get a cup and then you go to the vending machine. The staff of the place is responsible for keeping it clean. However in busy places sometimes there is trash around them (people dropping sugar packets on the floor etc). So perhaps you meant this kind.
Singapore has them too. Never eaten from them so I don’t know what the food quality is like, but they’re never busted or filthy like you’d see in Australia.
You can have a lot of nice things when you have a government (and a society) committed to law and order.
What exactly is gross and dirty about them? I have never thought about them that way (but I don't use them because they generally only have overpriced unhealthy crap).
It's very hit-or-miss in my experience. Some vending machines are immaculate, but the exact same type of machine by the same owner e.g. at another station can have their glass broken, have chewing gum put into it's mechanism for weeks, mystery liquids in the output, etc.
Anecdata, but a vending machine at the local rapid transit station (one of those two-sided hot drinks / soups and snacks combo machines) had its output chute filled with (very visible and smellable, probably human) feces for a week after(!) calling the service number and only then the owner cleaned it. Mhhh. Didn't inspire confidence in their general cleaning routine, for me.
I have no idea how our machines stack up against the ones from Japan or other parts of the world in the vandalism department, though, in practise and outside of city centres. They might face similar problems, I don't know.
Basically never vandalised (and always maintained, filled and working) even in the most isolated and rural places in Japan. I actually wonder about the economics of keeping a vending machine filled in some of the places I've been. How is it possible to have people driving miles to refill them and still make money.
Alternatively, if a company operates for decades, they can make a very, very stable product. Only bugfixes. I'd imagine some of these vending machines are manufactured like that.
Which means, a weekly drive by is enough to inspect, refill, drive on. I used to deliver meats to very rural locations, 10 deliveries over a 300+ km circular route from/back to the packing plant. At 80km/hr, the stops are the big slowdown.
Another way to think of it, is that remote often means little traffic, fewer stop signs, and higher speed limits.
I live 8km from a large city. It's often far faster for me to drive 15km to a corner store in a small nearby town, because I can do 120km/hr the whole way there almost, on my rural road, with no stop signs or lights.
Drive to the city, there are 5 stop lights before the first corner store, that's each way, so chances are high to hit a light. And even one light is 2 or 3 minutes delay.
So rural servicing and deliveries can be quite fast and efficient.
> How is it possible to have people driving miles to refill them and still make money.
I wondered that myself, after seeing some unlucky porter hauling cases of tea up to the vending machines at the top of some mountain temple (maybe Nikko?) on foot.
It was like something out of Death Stranding. It defied physics, looked absurd and would have killed him if he slipped on moss.
Naaaah. Recently I used a great vending machine in Brussels station when heading towards Amsterdam by train, rather than dropping my drink straight down using the curly metal things, it has a little platform that the drink slid into and then it brought it to the slot, avoids it getting shook up.
I think the core issue is that vending machines outside of Japan lack variety...there's not much in them.
That said in Europe (not really the UK though) you can always find little vending machine "nooks" filled with machines containing alcohol, drinks, medicines, condoms etc. I think the negative perception is because of these - they seem to get left dirty and homeless/general public just mess up the spot.
But when you think about it, that's less vending machines and more Japan's culture of cleanliness and lack of public disorder. Outside of Japan, well, people don't really give a crap unless it's their own property...
The US has had vending machines for cold soda and snacks forever. Though, without looking up numbers, there's probably been a general trend towards convenience stores and fast food over time. Certainly the vending machines in Japan are more ubiquitous than I think I've seen anywhere else.
Nothing to do with cleanliness, on the contrary they can be quite gross also. It’s because eating lunch out is relatively expensive, especially for students. Close to 13€ now after last years inflation craze, whereas cooking at home is more like 2€. It’s not uncommon to see even well paid white collar workers bring food boxes regularly.
Bringing lunches to work used to be a much more common meme in the US. (But maybe it still is among blue collar workers.) Does seem to have faded out a lot though.
Total tangent, but why don't homes use these ideas broadly? We have refrigerators, A/C and hot water heaters all in close proximity. Not to mention cool water. Would it really be so hard to get some of the waste heat or cool from those processes into the others?
>We have refrigerators, A/C and hot water heaters all in close proximity.
Maybe yes maybe no. My water heater is in the basement and I don't have AC. It would all have to be very house-specific and customized. And it would tie together what would otherwise be independent systems. A lot of complexity which is usually a bad thing especially at small scale.
One specific childhood memory in the UK is going to a public swimming pool and getting hot chicken soup from a vending machine as if it was a drink just like anything else.
Fun fact! The entire experience was a trial in sustainability, the water for the soup came, filtered, from the pool, and of course the pool contained a lot of soup, filtered, by human kidneys.
Are people aware of automats? They seem very cool nowadays but fell out of favor. Hot food from vending machines was a thing before it wasn’t a thing.
https://allthatsinteresting.com/automat
There's a channel on YouTube that explores some of these, they are so cleverly simple in some respects. Conveyers, servos, more mechanical than digital. But while some machines do all the work, there are also machines that get stocked daily with freshly cooked food that gets kept warm. Just in general, keeping all the machines stocked is likely a massive effort.
If I had to take a jab at the core difference between Japan and other countries, and why this stuff works there; Logistics prowess and manpower. Organised and affordable employees may be another way to word that.
The microwave vending machines are pretty uncommon. Slightly more common, found outside places like school/company cafeterias, is cup noodle vending machines. They simply dispense a cup of dry noodles and then have a hot water tap that you operate manually.
I had a “pizza” out of one of these things in the UK. Very, very bland. Sorta like a really cheap pitta bread with cheese on top.
I was pretty drunk so it didn’t matter, and it was fun to watch it mix flour and water to a dough, top it with sauce, cheese and pepperoni, then cook it in a matter of seconds.
But in the end there’s a reason we don’t usually go from flour-> eating in under 5 minutes!
If you want easy pizza, don't care too much about the taste and don't want to pay for delivery (or it's not available in your area), just buy a few frozen pizza. You can keep them for months in your freezer.
It's not great but still way better than vending machine pizza.
Food safety would probably be a nightmare and sounds totally disgusting. Automats did used to be a thing in some US cities but they pretty much gave way to fast food restaurants/convenience stores as we know them today.
I keep Kirkland canned Cold Brew stocked in my office. We have great hot options at work, but not iced ones. But we do have ice. It's bitter, it's unsweetened, but it packs a good amount of caffeine and is incredibly convenient. Even took a case with me on a cruise.
I have enjoyed UCC in the past; It's good, but I prefer my coffee without sugar or cream. I didn't try any of the hot canned options while in Japan, but did absolutely love some of the choices for other products I found in various vending machines.
UCC has had black unsweetened canned coffee for quite a while (UCC Black 無糖 sugarless).
Sugarless Japanese canned coffee tends to taste rough because it often includes some robusta beans, which are cheaper and more bitter-tasting. Which is why I prefer the less-sweet (微糖) variants, or with milk/creamer to balance the bitterness. The exceptions are the special cans advertising coffee from a specific country picked by some champion barista or other, which are better, but of course nowhere near as good as a freshly-brewed cup.
What's different about mass-produced coffee in Japan is that it leans heavily towards only mildly bitter coffee, not the hard bitter stuff you might get elsewhere. Convenience-store machine-brewed coffee is almost always pleasant and easy to drink unsweetened, which is not the case in many other countries. Heck, a few years ago the 7-11s here in Singapore brought in 7-11 Japan's coffee machines, but the beans they use here are far more bitter than the ones in Japan.
I agree about the rough taste in general. I've made it a habit to try as many different canned coffees as I can when visiting Japan (and every "black" coffee I saw), and looking back at my notes, I felt like "Premium BOSS Black" was quite good, and "UCC Black New Grounds Fruity Blend" and "UCC Black Wholly Brewed" were both decent, compared to most of the other black coffees.
I used to buy liters of Drink It Black (unsweetened black coffee) or Tasty Club (sweetened black coffee) which I chugged on the 203 bus that I took to Japanese school. Good times!
I definitely think that something is very whack about about the Japanese canned coffees. I assumed it was some chemical process to get more use out of already used grounds or some flavor additive.
Finding good coffee in Japan, particularly cold brew/dutch coffee, was hard for me. Finding it at a cafe that doesn't also allow smoking was harder.
I'm still not sure if it was my lack of skill in finding coffee/cafes that I liked or if the coffee/coffee culture was different and not as good.
I found Taiwan and Korea both had high quality and familiar coffee, at least to the US perspective. They also had very nice cafes. Vietnam does great coffee too, but Vietnam is more innovative than refined with their drinks and has a very distinct and unique coffee culture. In Vietnam cold brew was harder to find, but I didn't miss it because the other options were novel and great.
> Finding it at a cafe that doesn't also allow smoking was harder.
As a long-time Japan resident, I had the same problem for many years. But smoking indoors in public places was finally banned nationwide in Japan effective April 2020 [1].
I don’t know how effective the new rule is in bars and the like, but all of the cafes I’ve been in in recent years have been either completely nonsmoking or have had a separate, walled-off smoking room.
I have never had UCC but that sounds a lot like what cheap instant coffee tastes like to me. Initially I thought it might be an auto reaction to old break rooms when people were allowed to smoke so I associated instant coffee with cigarette smoke, but I had a cold brew in a bottle the other day and that same sensation happened.
Kirkland canned cold brew is extremely bitter and tastes overly dark and borderline burnt to me.
On other hand Trader Joe’s canned cold brew is perfectly medium for my taste
I think Kirkland cold brew's problem is the Colombian bean it uses. I remember trying a Colombian pour over and feeling a greater understanding about my dislike of Kirkland cold brew.
Agreed, that Columbian Supremo is roasted beyond what I would even call dark. The Kirkland signature blends are roasted by Starbucks so we know why those are burnt but the Columbian seems to be by someone else.
It sounds like you actually don’t like them. And all the offices I’ve been at, getting hot black coffee took about as much work as getting ice into a cup.
Cold brew coffee is the easiest coffee to have on hand in the morning, and, as a bonus, so-so beans make pretty good cold brew.
Big mason jar, one of those coke brew tea/coffee inserts for it that you can find on Amazon, start it about 8 hours before you want it (the night before) and you’re golden. Add coffee, add water, stick in fridge overnight. It’s not more work than the simplest methods of making hot coffee in the morning, short of keurig or instant coffee.
Don’t settle for kinda-bad premade cold brew when you could have kinda-OK homemade for less money and barely more work.
(Incidentally, I drink my hot coffee black, but like about a teaspoon of heavy cream per 16-20oz of cold brew—I find all but the absolute best cold brew is a lot better with a little splash of cream)
In the past year I switched to a mason jar pouring spout that has a built in filter that's at the right granularity to filter cold brew as you pour it into a glass:
That saves a bit of effort since the cold brew gets filtered when I pour it.
As far as how I prepare it:
I add a bit shy of 1/2 a cup of ground coffee per 64oz mason jar, mix vigorously and let it sit overnight (less than that and the flavors aren't quite yet there).
I don't proactively filter out the coffee grinds since the built in filter takes care of that. When one jar starts to run low, I start another one.
Get cheap mason jars locally wherever, (wal mart is usually cheap, some grocery stores may have cheap ones), grounds in filter, filter in jar, add water, jar goes in fridge. You can also use them to make cold (or hot) brewed iced tea from loose leaves. There are different sizes of those filters for different sizes of jars. I like the 64oz jars.
Pull the filter out when it’s done to avoid overbrewing/oversteeping. Keeps a few days in the fridge.
Recipes (grounds:water ratio, brew time) abound online. Pick one and try it. I like 10-12 hours with something like 80g of grounds, with this method, for a 64oz jar.
I should get a pour spout lid for the jar, that’d never occurred to me and they look nice.
One downside to filtering at the lid instead of in a basket-type filter is that you have to pour it in another container to stop the brew. Whether that matters depends on consumption patterns and personal preference.
Not the parent, but have been using on of these Hario cold brew coffee makers for years. Fill up the basket with ground coffee, add water, and let it sit in the fridge overnight. I agree with the parent, there is no need to use expensive beans for cold brew (although I do always grind my own beans). Black cold brew has a bit of a funny taste to me, but with a splash of milk it’s delicious.
Getting hot coffee and tea out of a vending machine when it’s cold out is one of the best experiences of visiting Japan. Particularly since the machines are everywhere.
Yes! I was first introduced to this during a cold January while having to stand watch in the port (ex-U.S. Navy). The highlight of my morning was that warm can dropping down and warming up my hands for the next ~30 minutes.
In Australia they are making barista coffee machines that make reasonable good Lattes! (and definitely better than starbuccks). I think it was Coles “Urban Coffee”. Not as amazing as a light roast single O from a coffee obsessed cafe. But better than a lot of coffee shops!
I'm going against the grain here but I don't really subscribe to the starbucks bashing that seems to be a common sport. I don't go to Starbucks very often at all, mostly at airports, but in all honesty I find there's nothing wrong with it. As in: I've had hand-crafted coffees made by no-nonsense barristas with man buns in the most artisan brick-walled coffee shops that you can think of and I didn't think they were a lot better.
Maybe I'm just not enough of a purist though. But then again, probably most people aren't.
Let's not forget what you average cup of coffee was like in America before Starbucks came along.
It's fine to just like what you like! There's nothing wrong with being happy with Starbucks. And yes, Starbucks deserves a lot of credit for promoting an interest in better quality coffee.
But a lot of what has attracted Starbucks' huge audience has been their very milky, sweetened, flavoured beverages that end up not being much of a coffee by the time they're consumed, and I think when people scoff at Starbucks, that's a big part of what they're reacting to. But I do think people who just have very milky coffee like cafe latte and flat white but then diss Starbucks are mostly just being snobbish.
I'm from Melbourne Australia, which several people in this thread have commented about, and I know what people are talking about, both those who talk about the good coffee here and those who talk about the superiority complex we have developed about it. I can see it both ways. Starbucks didn't take off here, not because people thought it was "bad"; we just didn't need it, as people already had favourite cafes serving coffee they really liked, so there was no need to change.
But the modern-day, 3rd-wave coffee snobbery thing arose a few years after that. On the one hand, like everything Melbourne claims to be better at, it can be a bit eye-rolly. On the other hand, my favourite coffee these days is long macchiato (I developed the taste for it when spending time in Italy and marrying into an Italian-Australian family), and even in Melbourne it can be hit-and-miss finding a cafe that does a long-mac "right"; I don't mean to be snobby about it, it's just about how I like it having developed a taste for it over several years. But it does make a difference that cafes here do try very hard to achieve very high standards in the coffee they serve, and people here really appreciate it.
Most people don't encounter enough Australians to know this, but the #1 way to identify an Australian is their absurd patriotic complex about how they're the only country with good coffee. This universally comes with insulting Starbucks, which is the only non-Australian coffee they seem to know about.
It's true that Melbourne does have good coffee, but the city is basically an accidental reinvention of Seattle. But they don't know this since they haven't been to Seattle.
Generally I feel like people in the coffee production chain give too much credit to James Hoffman types and/or baristas with man buns and not any credit to the actual farmers.
Australia/NZ was the only place with good coffee a long time ago but that ship has sailed, you can get great coffee everywhere. Also I am not so much bashing starbucks as using it as a yardstick to say a machine can make good coffee from fresh beans, which I find amazing
True. As a matter of fact, almost all coffee making involves machines, at least when we're talking about the espresso variety. For years, fully automatic coffee makers have been a big trend even in consumer electronics, i.e., lots of homes have machines sitting on their counter top that make all kinds of coffees at the push of a button. Why shouldn't a vending machine be able to do the same...
I've met many Australians, and have not experienced what you describe. If anything, coffee culture is a Melbourne thing, with Brisbane being en par. I have not heard of, say, Perth being especially known for their association with coffee drinking.
As far as I know, it is thanks to immigrants from Italy that an admittedly good and wide-spread coffee culture has established in Melbourne, but I never felt that it stood out in how Australians perceive themselves.
> I have not heard of, say, Perth being especially known for their association with coffee drinking.
Not Perth (the capital city) no .. but definitely Northbridge (suburb slightly north of the city centre) and Fremantle (port | harbour 'city' down river from Perth) beacuse they've been Italian strongholds for decades.
Sydney has coffee culture both in the city and in the burb. There be brick walls, long queues, single Os, beards, baggy clothes, Timemore scales and hairbuns closer to you than a rat in London.
In addition to hipsterism there is ubiquity: baristas in petrol stations, swimming pools, dog parks, the beach, the pub, everywhere!
Third wave coffee isn't mainly about espresso in the US, that seems to be an Italian (and Australian) thing.
Of course, the US has always had plenty of Italians - specifically in SF and NYC, where the rich ones gave us Nancy Pelosi and high end grocery stores, while the poor ones gave us all those mafia movies. I'm not sure if Seattle's coffee shops came from them; I always assumed it was just because the weather made everyone depressed.
These are outdoor roadside vending machines, sometimes out in the middle of nowhere (or at least, not near any convenience stores). Driving down a quiet rural road on a cold morning and stopping for a hot coffee in a can is a nice break.
I drank sooo much canned coffee during my time in Japan. I really wish it was regularly available in the US. You can get Starbucks drink nonsense but I want real, decent god-fearing black coffee.
You can get the Japanese stuff at Asian markets near me, and I do regularly, but it’s not nearly as convenient as it being in convenience stores.
You can get black cold coffee in larger containers in supermarkets but, yeah, in general the canned/bottled cold coffee you can buy is oversweetened and overmilked for my taste.
Apparently the self-heating is chemical, triggering whatever mechanism mixes a quantity of quicklime with water, and the result is exothermic.
I tried a self-heating coffee once and to be fair it did heat up pretty well, but the coffee was overly bitter and kind of gross. With the right coffee I could see this being quite nice.
These are aluminum cans, I presume? Is the “hot” coffee more like lukewarm coffee or is this something that one would only be consumed in the winter when one is wearing gloves?
Tommy Lee Jones has been doing commercials for Boss coffee for a while:
> Since 2006, Tommy Lee Jones has appeared in a series of Boss coffee ads. Boss is a Suntory brand of hot coffee that is sold canned (hot or cold). In the commercials, Jones is an alien visiting Japan. He always has a different job—such as train station employee, taxi driver, or a tanned host—as he lives in his new surroundings.
Host club's hosts are often tanned, it's part of the stereotype. The beginning of the commercial shows him as a "host" (as can be seen by him being a host inside a host club, entertaining a woman), and the end shows him as a "tanned host".
MiB was released (hold on to your chair) in 1997 and the ads are from 2006 onwards (although the clips I've seen on YouTube seem to be VHS rips).. so, no?
Fond memories of working on the Georgia Coffee account when I was in Japan at the start of my career - insanely profitable drink for Coke as there’s very little distribution cost, simply strike a deal with the bottlers and boom you have 200m units in front of people.
This means that you can have insane variety - 20/30 different types of this canned coffee are not uncommon at all and the Japanese consumers are absolutely hooked on it.
One aspect I rarely seen mentioned is The price of these canned coffees in Japan. I remember most ranging from 100-250 yen ($1-2 when I last visited). As a tourist that was the biggest selling point for me, getting pretty good coffee warm or cold in seconds.
Sadly every time I see some mention of UCC or Boss coffee I spend a few minutes browsing to see if it can be imported near that price. Lately though it has been getting better with occasional sale on Amazon making them a nice treat.
It really isn’t that great. Sure it will make do if you are deprived of it in a country where coffee culture is basically non-existent and being warm and accessible everywhere is super nice.
But try it when you are home and it’s pretty vile. I prefer instant one most of times (unless I wish convenient packaging i.e. day in the beach, etc)
>You and I would have grumbled and moved on. But not Toshikage.
In many of these sort of entrepreneurship stories, this is the key takeaway. It seems like one really has to disable their auto-grumbling setting and enable something else instead. Of course this is easier said than done.
Is this an innate ability? Something that can be trained?
I think it comes more easily to some people than others but I see no reason why it cannot be trained. In my personal case (I find myself often finding and wishing I could solve such problems) I don't have a very high threshold of accepting the "existing state" if it's not comfortable for me.
The article mentions that seeing a collection of historical Japanese vending machines would be neat: there's a great episode of "Strange Parts" on YT that's an engineering focused visit to an informal Japanese vending machine museum.
The Tommy Lee Jones campaign was wildly successful and extremely long-lived but the post makes it sound like it launched the brand. This is not true. Boss was around for some time before that campaign.
I discovered and fell in love with Japanese canned coffees when I moved to the Bay Area. There's lots of Asian markets there that carry them.
They are not great coffee nor are they bad. They're mostly just good. Boss and UCC and other brands I can't remember have options with different roasts and brews. In a sufficiently stocked store you can probably find a coffee you like.
Edit: accidentally a word
I used to buy a bunch and put them in a paper bag in the shared office fridge. I stuffed the bag in the back so no one ever disturbed it. I still dream of being able to grab one from a vending machine to get the full effect.
Boss Coffee, Rainbow Mountain blend is my favorite. Really hits the spot.
I live in the Bay Area as well and I've found that both Mitsuwa and Nijiya markets haven't had them in stock nearly as much as pre-COVID; guessing some logistics/supply chain situation that still hasn't quite recovered.
I'm going back to Japan next month though, so my cravings will finally be satisfied!
My favorite Japanese brand is Georgia Emerald Mountain coffee, by Coca-Cola Japan, because Georgia doesn't make coffee or have anywhere called Emerald Mountain.
There's also a crepe stand in Akiba called "Atlanta Crazy Crepes" and I always wondered if it was somehow related.
> Tadao had somewhat of a reputation as a frugal man. He hated seeing things go to waste. And he couldn’t shake off the frustration of the coffee. “If only there was a way I could buy and carry my coffee with me…” he reasoned.¶ Fate couldn’t have chosen a better person for this encounter.¶ Tadao Ueshima was the CEO of UCC Coffee
Does this still exist? It seems like most people I know who break into even slightly high earnings and attain some level of affluence are in it primarily for the appearances associated with affluence—signalling that they're above thinking about stuff like this.
I suspect this is a reasonably common origin story. Plenty of people hate waste, and the ones who have some level of wealth or power just happen to be more readily positioned to act on solving it.
For what it’s worth, I was able to start Framework to combat e-waste because I was financially in a position to do so.
There are plenty of wealthy frugal people, they just don't get talked about much since they aren't as exciting.
Also often people who have tons of wealth start divesting it once they realize they have too much. And again a "could have been a dozens of millionaire but just a millionaire" doesn't make engaging content.
> Warren Buffet still lives in the same smallish house he bought in the 60s.
50s, not 60s. And it's a bad counterexample. Warren Buffett is 93 years old. (Or to put it another way, Warren Buffett is old enough to have bought a house in the 50s. I'm discussing the differences between then and now: people who _might_ be 50, but definitely weren't alive in the 50s, let alone buying a house.)
I’d never heard this about Warren Buffet and so looked it up out of curiosity. I’m going to be honest, I hesitate to call it “smallish” for the average American (around 6500 sq ft). But I’ll admit it’s smaller and more modest than most homes owned by billionaires. At least according to my brief search, it’s the only house he owns, too.
"Smallish" his Omaha house is about triple the size of the average modern American home, and he bought it in 1958 when homes were much smaller than today!
I think there is cultural divide between manufacturing, retail and such industries and tech or others. In first category being frugal and efficient makes lot of difference in long run. And in the later signalling has lot of value specially when VC is involved, but also later.
There's certainly a cultural divide between industries, but I don't see frugality showing up in the discrepancies. I don't live in the Bay Area, and most people in my sphere of acquaintances who live on the middle-class+ plane aren't getting paid to write software (or trying to) let alone chasing VC money, and none of the people that I interact with most frequently are. (Anecdotally, the software people actually seem more willing to voice positions that align with frugality. Developers are notorious for not wanting to pay for tools, for example.)
I never had these hot bottled/canned beverages, despite spending considerable time in Tokyo's subways. I was always concerned about what chemicals could leach into the beverage from the interior of the container, with the prolonged exposure to hot liquid.
Heat in general is not good for foodstuff, as it generally breaks down nutrients and creates free radicals.
Interesting, yes I can see why that might be a health issue. But these things have been around for decades now, so presumably they’ve solved this problem.
Edit: I found this:
IH vending machines
This is a type of vending machine equipped with Induction Heating. They store canned beverages at normal room temperature (or lower temperature) on standby and rapidly heat up a selected drink during the process of dispensing. It is possible to raise the heat up to 140 degrees or so in less than one minute in the case of a 250 ml can.
> In those days you would buy your drink, drink it on the spot, and return the bottle. As luck would have it, he mistimed his coffee and his train started to pull out of the station. He hurriedly returned his half-finished bottle and ran to his train.
> Now, Tadao had somewhat of a reputation as a frugal man. He hated seeing things go to waste. And he couldn’t shake off the frustration of the coffee. “If only there was a way I could buy and carry my coffee with me…” he reasoned.
Something about this doesn't make sense to me. Why not just return the bottle to a different machine, or bring it back the next time he was in the station? It seems to be like a bottle is actually easier to carry with you than a can, since a bottle can usually be resealed (even crown closure bottles you can push the cap back on).
Author here. This was actually something that puzzled me too. There must have been many steps between "Want to carry my coffee with me" and "Let's stuff it in a can" that I wasn't clear about. So I did some more digging (but didn't put this in the post because I thought it'd make it very long).
I don't have the definitive answer, but a few things to consider:
- The bottles might have been resealable, but you would have to be worried about leaks for as long as you had the bottle with you. FWIW, the bottles from that time looked like this: https://www.townnews.co.jp/0607/images/a001046055_01.jpg
- Someone going on a long-distance train might not be able to bring the bottle back to the same station
- The store at a different station might not take the bottle from you since shops usually pay a bottle deposit to their suppliers and own the (fungible) bottle
- In many countries with bottled drinks the store charges you a bottle deposit that's much more expensive than the drink. Perhaps the frugal CEO did not want to pay that.
- Or even if he wanted to, did not have the time for that transaction given the train started pulling away
I find it interesting that people associate italy with good coffee. Given their reputation there the coffee is poor. Espresso is typically burned quite badly and praised as strong.
Northern europe, Ireland, and the UK have far better coffee. Also Oz. At least in my experience.
Also, to briefly comment on the oz conversation happening here - perth does have fantastic coffee. My favourite cafe ever is a little place called issacs in rocko.
you're completely right. but most italians will never admit it, shunning all of the alternatives.
the strange thing is, we are used to different grapes varieties that are used to produce different wines, and everyone knows which tomato goes in a sandwich, which ones are better in a caprese, which for tomato sauce. but we are all fine with not knowing which kind of coffee we drink, and not knowing how it was treated...
that's why in Italy it's really rare to find someone that drinks coffee as it is, usually we add either sugar (or honey) or milk in order to mask the fact that coffee here tastes too burnt and bitter.
only in the past few years specialty coffee is starting to appear in the bigger cities, and I'm finally getting used to drink coffee after a whole life of tea with milk and the occasional macchiato caldo (espresso with a dash of hot milk), unless when abroad
i tried to acquire the taste coffee and honey. never succeeded. though it should be noted that I used acacia honey which is quite acid itself. so yeah, it was a dumb exercise. now I got no time to explore coffee anymore. as long as the coffee tastes bitter and a bit sweet AND goes well with cig, then I'm fine with it.
Australia and New Zealand have probably the best coffee (on average) of anywhere I've been, if you like milk drinks. The UK has a lot of fantastic coffee shops, but it's still overrun with Costas and a lot of places have added flat whites to their menu, even though they can't make them well.
Nowadays Italian coffee is more about the machines and various methods of extraction than the beans themselves. I assume at some point the northeastern African connection provided Italy with better quality coffee than what was available in America but globalization and small batch roasters changed that.
It seems that what is considered good coffee varies greatly. Here in Finland the traditional way to make coffee is very lightly roasted, which makes it quite acidic. Many foreigners don't think very highly of this type of coffee, but people who are used to it often prefer it to "stronger" tasting medium or dark roasted coffees.
I don't know it there's any objective way to determine which coffee is "good" coffee.
The bean is everything and brands like Lavazza are chemically tasting coffee beans. Small shops and roasters with good beans produce better products and small shops with good baristas know how to extract a good cup of coffee. I guess those people are everywhere but hard to find.
When I lived in Perth in 2008 the coffee was awful compared to NZ (and to Melbourne, where I ended up afterwards). I lived in Leederville and Subiaco, both with popular cafe strips, but broadly awful coffee.
Wondering if they have similar stories about tea. There aren’t many good ice teas in vending machines. Barely taste like tea. Personally I don’t drink coffee but can imagine it’s similar to the tea problem?
Drink vending machines in Japan will typically have 3-4 types of unsweetened iced tea (such as black tea, oolong tea, barley tea, green tea and jasmine tea) and sometimes sweet/flavoured black tea and English-inspired milk tea. In winter 1-2 of those will be offered hot, too.
Always struck me as a weird descrepency in William Gibson's "Idoru":
> (...) His computer there, a featureless black cube. A shallower shelf of the juice-carton board supported a pale blue microwave, unopened ramen bowls, and half a dozen tiny steel cans of coffee.
> One of these, freshly microwaved, was hot in Chia's hand. The coffee was strong, sugary, thickly creamed. She sat beside him on the lumpy bed ledge, a padded jacket wadded up behind her for a cushion.
I mean, you can't (well shouldn't) microwave a steel can, right?
A (regular) steel beverage can is pretty thin, and comes with sharp edges on the opener ring/tab? (I suppose the tab could be plastic - but they're not now)
My buddy brought me one of these from Japan, halfway across the world in a luggage and still tasted good.
I drank it cold, never thought I could warm it up. Was an ok cold brew.
The greatest invention of mankind. Never understood why this didn't catch on here. Don't have to time to grab a coffee from Kiosk when I'm waiting for a train.
Back in the early 2000's (maybe 2004-2005) I remember buying a can of Coffee from WHSmiths which was self-heating - I think through some exothermic chemical reaction.
It was also really bad as I recall, more like an instant Nescafé than something you'd get in a coffee shop. I didn't repeat the experience.
The first time I went to Japan, I was wandering around Osaka with a friend. I spied a vending machine featuring a new canned coffee and started laughing. The coffee was called BM.
Granted, coffee has that effect on some people, but I think Pokka was unaware what BM is a euphemism for in English.
> Pokka collaborated with a vending machine manufacturer to build a “hot-and-cold” vending machine which could sell both hot and cold beverages simultaneously
How does the 'hot' thing work? Is it kept hot for long periods of time?
I miss the UCC Drink It Black coffee cans. I used to see them at Asian grocery stores (Mitsuwa was where I first tried the cans) and would buy a dozen or so at a time. I guess they discontinued the line.
That was good stuff! I'd buy it by the liter at the 7-11 near where I lived in Kyoto, and chug it on the 203 "guru guru bus" on my way to Japanese school.
I was in Sasebo, Japan in the early 1980's and remember buying cold coffee in a can from a vending machine similar to buying a can of Coke in the States.
It’s probably the heat transfer from your mouth and the shape of the holding medium [1]. For me, can > glass > plastic. Apparently there’s a certain kind of art to choosing shapes for cold beverages.
I think that might be moot. A can conducts so well that I imagine it pretty much shares the temperature of the beverage at all times. So how much is the heat capacity of the can vs. the liquid? I’m betting the liquid is like 99% of it.
I would actually expect that thermal conductivity is so much better that they heat up faster. But at the same time sensation of holding one makes it feel cooler.
i tried Boss hot coffee in japan, holy moley is it sweet. Cant say I was a fan. Though Sydneysiders can be coffee snobs - im sure this works for 99% of the population
