Illy - 3 Reviews

Coffee, frappe, cappuccino, mocha, Frappuccino, Mochaccino...there is a lot going on these days in the world of coffee. Is it all good? Eh, it depends on who you ask and what you drink. Me personally, I don't like straight coffee but canned, usually of Far East descent I enjoy. When a Denmark makes a coffee, for some reason, I feel you should listen. This comes from no sort of knowledge of the country as a whole so if you know something about Denmark, and more specifically something that would validate/invalidate me, I'm all ears.

As I lead in with an intro like that, I quickly wonder why I spent the time to write it because this isn't particularly great by any stretch. Why? Well I'll tell you, why. Numero uno is that there is not enough coffee taste. With a "coffee" drink, I expect, nay, demand a coffee taste. This tastes mostly like a coffee flavored low fat milk. Milk first, coffee second. It's a little sweet but that's to be expected. If they could work out the ratio of coffee to milk that would make this great but it's a pretty wide miss as far as canned coffee drinks are concerned.

Mr. Brown, I once again would like to shake your hand for nailing this category and it's different blends and types of coffees out of the park. Illy, I have praised you in the past and although I am not looking down on you, I cannot in conscience mind recommend this product to my faithful followers. My apologies to you and yours.

I am not one of those dudes who wake up and has a coffee before anything nor am I the guy that has a coffee at any point in the day. "Dude, sometimes you just need that jolt." you might say, but you know what I say? No, dude, I don't. If I'm tired, I'm tired. My body is exhausted from doing stuff all day and needs to relax, not take an adrenaline shot to keep going at the pace I was going at. Sometimes I get down and sure, coffee might make sense, but I push through it and get to the end of the day and sleep like a baby.

Ignoring that entire entry paragraph, today I thought it might be a nice change to give it a whirl. Now I'm not going to drink a drink and then sit around like a turd and wait for the effects to kick in. I'm sure it's there, but I don't care and I'm not looking for it. It's all about taste and not function with this guy. If this were supposed to do something, I would let you know. It's a coffee drink. You know what it does.

Taste. It's, once again, just coffee enough that anyone in the range of "kind of likes the taste of coffee" to "loves coffee" will enjoy. There is enough milk and sugar to smooth it out and leave it with its inherent coffee bitterness. This wasn't bad. It's more "adult" than a Starbuck's Frappuccino because it's not as sweet and still tastes like coffee in its base rather than a melted iced coffee drink.

I got this at a steal from a local discount store so you might be able to do the same. Fifty cents doesn't buy you a lot these days but if it buys you a nice, refreshing coffee drink, wicked.

When I was in college, I had a friend called Chad. Chad worked for Student Associates, which basically meant if there was a promo going on from an outside company, he would be on of the people to work it. Handing out products and flyers and just doing promotion was his gig. Kind of like a hired street team, if you are familiar with that term, a term which I feel died out as soon as people started spending time online on Facebook and Twitter and not on the streets where things used to happen.

One of the companies that he did stuff for was Starbucks. They had him handing out cases of their new Frappuccino in the smallest possible containers. Those lil' baby 4oz containers like V8 comes in. 4 ounces? Am I a child? Nay, I am a man who wears child sized clothing.

So Chad took a case of the stuff and gave it to my roommate, Evan, and I and we didn't know where to start, so we decided to just jump head first into the case and destroyed about half that first day, got sick, and struggled to finish the second half.

This Illy Latte Macchiato tastes a lot like that but less sweet and more coffee taste. It's teetering on the edge of my dislike for coffee and my like for coffee tasting things. It's pretty good. There is just the right amount of sugar to offset the otherwise strong coffee taste. I think this is a good product for people like me that don't hate the taste of coffee in things, but don't like coffee itself, all the way up to coffee lovers.

Good job, Illy. You've got a huge market.