The store where I usually get the Kopiko coffee candy recently ran out of the bags in the size that I normally buy. They have a huge bag available for 300 pesos, but I don't want big bags. When my nieces and nephews see a large bag of candy, they won't stop hounding me until it's gone. Their teeth are bad enough as it is and they don't need MORE candy to make them worse (they already eat candy every single day).

The store is on Magsaysay Drive, near the Olongapo City Mall, and the sign says "Circle J" outside (very similar to the Circle K stores in the US). Some of the labels and racks inside the store say "J-Mart", so I can only assume they decided to change their name at some point and didn't change all the references. Anyway, since I wanted coffee candy, I decided to buy another brand.

X.O. Coffee Candy

The X.O. Coffee Candy comes under the brand name of "Jack 'n Jill" for the candy division of the Universal Robina Corporation (URC). URC is one of the largest brand food product companies in the Philippines and they have a ton of candies under the "Jack 'n Jill" brand, including candies that resemble cough drops.

I don't know how much a bag of X.O. Coffee Candy costs. I wasn't paying attention, but it's near to the same price as Kopiko. Kopiko is made in Indonesia whereas the X.O. products are all made in the Philippines.

Ingredients

Like Kopiko, X.O. Coffee Candy isn't the healthiest candy to have around. I'll live with the consequences. The ingredients are sugar, glucose syrup, hydrogenated vegetable fat, skimmed milk powder, coffee powder, soya lecithin and iodized salt.

When I see "hydrogenated" on anything, I tend not to buy it or consume it. I've seen and eaten worse and I want my coffee candy, so I'll live with it.

The Taste Test

While a piece of Kopiko coffee candy is a little dark brown square, a piece of X.O. Coffee Candy is oval-shaped and a little thicker. Kopiko comes in bags of 150 grams (the regular size anyway) and X.O. Coffee Candy comes in bags of 175 grams, which means X.O. provides 25 grams more for about the same price.

To be honest, I can't tell the difference in taste. Kopiko is a little stronger in flavor and that's about it. I think I'll be sticking to X.O. Coffee Candy from now on, unless they run out of it as well. In that case, Kopiko is the backup treat.

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I normally don't recycle pictures to use on multiple articles, but I really have to make an exception when it comes to coffee beans. There only so many ways to present them and hunting down new photographs is a chore in itself. Anyway, that's obviously not what this article is about. No, I just wanted to throw out some things about coffee beans that some people aren't aware of.

Coffee Beans are NOT Beans

When my 23-year old son doesn't know that coffee beans aren't really beans, it's time to mention it over and over again and as often as possible. People who aren't familiar with the history of the coffee plants, especially young people, take way too much for granted by the way things are called. Coffee beans start out as berries of the coffee plants. They're then dried and the seeds, the part that people call the beans, are removed and dried before heading off on their next stop in the journey from the plant to your stomach.

Roasted Coffee Beans

From what I've seen, most coffee beans sold AS coffee beans in supermarkets and other such places are roasted beforehand. What I mean to say is that you usually can't find coffee beans that haven't been roasted yet. I know raw coffee beans are available; otherwise coffee roasters wouldn't be available to the general public.

I don't trust my cooking skills, much less any kind of roasting skills. I could screw up barbecued hot dogs. No, I will always leave that step of the process to others.

Coffee Grounds

I really don't have any idea why ground coffee is called "coffee grounds". I guess it was coined by some unimaginative person way back when. I would call it coffee flakes or coffee powder (I've actually heard "coffee powder" used and it's even displayed as such on instant coffee labels), but never coffee grounds.

In most supermarkets, heck even in most supermarkets in the Philippines (where I live — no, I'm not a Filipino before anyone asks me yet again), you can buy coffee beans that only need to be ground up to be used. Usually, one or more coffee grinders are available nearby, including generic bags to put the results in.

Although coffee grinders are available for home use, it's still another area step in the process that I'll gladly leave to someone else. I won't use a coffee grinder to grind coffee beans at the market and I won't grind them at home. It's just way too easy to get coffee that only needs one step from the container to the cup and I'm basically a lazy person when it comes to doing things for myself.

There is a specialty coffee bean that I can't seem to find here in the Philippines, that I'm really fond of, but I'm not going to mention it yet. I'll save that for my next article. After reading all that I wrote above, can you guess what I'm going to be writing about? Hint: They're sold at places that have the same title as this blog (or a slight variation of using "or" instead of "and").

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