Review: What you need to know about these flash-frozen espresso shots

Zenma Coffee

Nothing makes the Monday blues worse than drinking a cup of burnt, acidic coffee from the office machine - the bitterness in our cup runneth over. Instant coffee doesn't cut it either; it's usually not aromatic or flavourful enough to get us going on a slow morning. And, if you're anything like us, you're probably tired of spending a tenth of your salary ordering coffee daily. So, it felt like an answer from the heavens when we saw an Instagram ad for flash-frozen espresso shots by Zenma Coffee. The ad promised a perfectly extracted espresso that can be melted at any time to make a delicious cup of espresso, Americano, latte, or anything else you could order at a café. Intrigued, we placed an order immediately.

In Mumbai, the company offers next-day delivery. The pods arrived in boxes of 10, nestled among ice packs that keep the coffee frozen for the duration of the delivery, but not much longer. So be sure to put the pods away in the freezer immediately. Zenma offers two variants - a dark roast with tasting notes of toasted hazelnut and decadent dark chocolate and a medium with notes of roasted nuts, caramel and a hint of pepper. Both variants are sourced from Chikmagalur, Karnataka. A light roast is expected to launch soon, too.

Partial to darker roasts, we open that first and take in the rich, smokey aroma - a good omen. There are a bunch of ways to melt and use the frozen shots, but after some trial and error, we found a couple of methods we preferred the most. We found that simply pouring hot water or milk on the shot doesn't melt it, and the coffee ends up lukewarm. And any self-respecting coffee aficionado knows that microwaving would ruin the flavour profile. The method that best preserves the flavour is slowly thawing the pod in the fridge over a few hours. But that takes time and foresight. In our daily rush to get to work, we found that submerging the sealed shot in a glass of room temperature or slightly warm water for five minutes worked just as well and, in fact, ensured a hotter cuppa. then, to our utter delight, we discover the best method yet - simply plopping a frozen pod in our bag and heading to work. By the time we reached the office, the shot had melted, and we could add frothy steamed milk straight from the office coffee machine!

This is only advisable if your commute takes under three hours; anything over that and the espresso's flavour will begin to fade. Zenma recommends drinking the dark roast with dairy, while the medium roast can be had both black or with milk. The dark roast is richer in body, but we quite enjoyed it black. Unlike instant coffee, which makes for a flat Americano, or the bitter swill that spurts out of the office coffee machine, the black coffee we made with the dark roast had a natural sweetness to the aroma and went down easily even without sugar. True to the description, we tasted hints of dark chocolate and roasted nuts in it. We also tried it with milk and found that it lent itself beautifully to a hot or cold latte.

In our honest opinion, the medium roast is not as versatile. It does not have the same complexity and sweetness as the dark version, and we found it a tad acidic when had black. Mixing it with dairy masks the acidity, though. Would we buy it again? Here's some basic coffee math - at R590 for a box of 10 shots, each cup costs R59. That's considerably less than the R300 we fork out while ordering coffee from a café but much more expensive than the average R5 it costs to make an instant cuppa, or the R22 cup we brew in our Aeropress at home. If you brew fresh coffee at home, we wouldn't recommend this as a replacement. But if you're addicted to ordering a cup of Joe from your local café, Zenma might just be your new brew-mance.

What: Zenma Coffee
Order: zenmacoffee.com
Cost R560 for a box of 10 shots
Rating : good

Zenma Coffee didn't know we ordered from them. Sunday Mid-Day reviews anonymously and pays for orders.