What kind of coffee is Folgers?

Canister of Red Folgers Classic Roast ground coffee

QUESTION: What kind of coffee is Folgers? Is it high quality? – Leta F

ANSWER: The Folgers brand was jump-started right in the heart of the gold rush boom in San Francisco, California, in the 1870s. The big coffee company in town at that time was called Pioneer Steam Coffee Co., and they wanted to produce ready-to-brew coffee grounds to save people the hassle of preparing their own coffee beans. Pioneer had a vision, and they had sourced plenty of whole beans. Now they just needed a mill to roast and process their coffee. Little did they know, the teenage carpenter they hired to build the mill, would soon own the company. In 1872, J.A. Folger, the young man who built the mill, bought Pioneer Coffee Co. outright and changed the name to Folger’s Coffee Co.

The Folgers brand was a big success, and quickly spread all over the United States. The company was eventually incorporated into Proctor & Gamble, and later sold to popular preservatives brand Smucker’s. Folgers classic roast is supposedly the same blend recipe that has been used since the company was founded in 1872. Folgers describes the blend as rich with a smooth flavor. Folgers also makes a variety of other blends, including a mildly-roasted breakfast blend, a medium-roast Columbian blend, a dark-roast called Black Silk coffee, a Half-Caf blend, which contains half the caffeine amounts of their normal coffees, and a Decaf. Folgers coffee is also available in single-use pod coffee form, and they even have a line of cappuccino mixes and instant coffees.

Folgers classic roast is a very popular coffee blend of arabica and medium-roasted robusta coffee beans. The ingredients are simple. Inside of every can of Folgers classic roast is 100 percent coffee. Folgers, like Maxwell House, and many other popular mass-market coffee brands, produce coffee in pre-ground blends.

The Arabica type of coffee bean is the highest quality and is more expensive to grow, and more sought after, for their superior flavor and aroma, and prefer very particular climates at high altitudes. Robusta coffee beans contain higher caffeine levels, but a more bitter, and overpowering taste. Many budget-priced coffees are made with a blend of robusta and arabica coffee beans in order to cut costs, using arabica beans to help tame the more pronounced flavor of the robusta beans.

Many people love Folgers, and swear by it as their go-to coffee. There are plenty of coffee drinkers who will drink Folgers coffee for the entirety of their lives. There are probably at least a few hundred thousand people that actually believe that the best part of wakin up… well you get the point. And for what it is, (a pre-ground, budget-priced, mass-market name brand, white bread coffee), it has consistent flavor and is not that bad.

Coffee enthusiasts, those who really love coffee probably know that a cup of Folgers coffee is very underwhelming. I mean, it’s drinkable, if your palate has never experienced really great coffee, but once you have, there’s really no going back. Once you have a single-sourced, freshly-ground, high-quality cup of coffee brewed in a pour over or French press, there’s a whole new best part of waking up in town. But in an emergency or compared to really bad mass market brands that aren’t even made from Arabica beans, Folgers coffee is an option to consider.