Abominations: The Evilest Coffee Creations

Sometimes looking at the grotesque and revolting helps us better appreciate the everyday beauty we too often take for granted. To make you grateful for whatever cup of joe you imbibe next, take a look at a few of the more depraved designs wayward souls created with coffee.

Coca-Cola Blak

This evil union of cola and coffee flavor is a harpy of a beverage that tastes of the bitterness of 18th century British spinsters mixed with a generous portion of Nietzschean misanthropy. Imagine pouring carbonated gutter runoff into a well-worn ashtray and gulping the contents down. Whoever thought to mix cola and coffee must have looked no farther than the relative similarity of colors, as the name suggests, before deciding this flavor combination was a winner. I wish I could have asked this necromancer to try other similarly-colored foods mixed together to show them the error of their ways. Fancy some ranch dressing topping over vanilla icecream? Or are ketchup and cherries more your speed? Either way, carbonate the resulting mess and bottle it - it'll probably be tastier than Coca-Cola Blak.

Hard coffee candies

Neophytes and heretics might be offended by this one, but coffee candies are universally disgusting. Coffee is not candy and candy is not coffee. And while coffee indeed pairs phenomenally well with various sweets, and fits into sweeter recipes such as tiramisu like a well-choreographed dance, it was never designed to be consumed the way children consume lifesavers. I could forgive the audacity of the candy-coffee union itself more easily if they had managed to get the taste right, but somehow the coffee flavors in these candies skip the clean taste of fresh coffee and cut directly to the taste profile of a pot of Great Value coffee from an automatic coffee pot left on the electric warmer for 10 hours.

New Orleans style espresso tonic

You know what's better than coffee? In New Orleans, it's coffee and roasted chicory of course. And what's better than that? chicory espresso, poured into lemony tonic water with ice. This drink leans heavily into the acid profile, reminiscent of the first entry on this list sans the sugary coca flavor. If you escape with your esophageal lining intact, you'll note the uncontrollable grimace your face will be contorted to, much the same way lemon elicits a pucker except this is more about your newfound dissatisfaction with things you used to enjoy. Coffee, water, and even lemon will all be tainted for you then, and you'll likely turn to beignets for a little solace.

Java Monster

syrupy, sugary, and fake. The taste profile on this diabetic fast-track fits right in with the company's branding. So unnatural, it might have been the result of a mad scientist, but only if that scientist graduated last in his class and burned his taste buds off in a prior experiment. Mix up a strong cup of the worst instant coffee you can find, microwave it on high, add powdered milk, put the cup on your dashboard in the middle of July and leave it for a day - then you'll have an idea of what this smells like. Perhaps worst of all, my own experience with it tells me you're more likely to get queasy than energized.