Instant coffee has long been derided by coffee aficionados as somewhere between bilge water and toxic sludge. In the past, they weren't too far off the mark.

Manufacturers have made tweaks to their product along the way that can produce a beverage that, while it will never be mistaken for freshly ground beans, is drinkable.

Instant coffee is produced by grinding roasted beans very fine, dissolving it in water then drying the resulting mixture using one of a handful of methods. The resulting crystals or powder are then packaged for a caffeine-starved world.

When making your instant coffee, you'll improve the quality of your end product immeasurably if you use very hot water. Get lazy and use hot tap water and you won't release all the flavor compounds in the coffee and your taste buds will suffer.

There are, of course, other instant coffee-like beverages around, such as International Delight and instant cappuccinos and beverages that bear so little resemblance to coffee that they really shouldn't be in the same class.

In this test, we'll compare four national-brand unflavored instant coffees and one house brand, testing them on aroma, flavor and comparison to freshly ground java. There's no nutritional data provided, as instant coffee is classed as a flavoring, not a food product. The only nutritional component it adds to your water is caffeine, the substance without which life is not possible for those of us in the media.

Each brew is rated on an A-F scale, with tasting notes.

Nescafe Taster's Choice: This entry comes in single-serving tubes of powder, which gives it points for convenience. The powder dissolves quickly with just a few stirs. There was very little aroma, just a faint whiff of brewed coffee. The flavor was much richer, with no bitterness and very little chemical or canned taste. The after-impression was very much like freshly brewed java. Final grade: A-

Kava Acid Neutralized: Here's that instant coffee flavor older readers will remember from the early days of instant brew. The label says it's "acid neutralized," and, in this case, most of the coffee flavor has departed along with the acid. True to the label, it's not bitter. It's also not rich, aromatic or possessed of much in the way of fresh-brewed flavor. Final grade: D-.

Maxwell House Rich: The aroma came right out of the cup to say hello, and the flavor more or less backed up its promise. There was a good hint of roasted beans, with a bit of bitterness that wasn't overpowering. It lacked a good finish, with the taste dissipating quickly on the tongue. Final grade: B-.

Folger's Crystals: I'm old enough to remember the vaguely creepy "Mrs. Olsen" commercials for Folger's, and the instant coffee crystals have been around at least that long. But the flavor of today's product is nothing like that in the past. There was a faint but very pleasant aroma of freshly roasted beans, and the flavor followed that well. There was a bit too much bitterness, but also a subtle hint of spice in the flavor notes. Final grade: A.

Lowe's Foods: This was a nicely aromatic brew, with a real hit of fresh-brewed Colombian beans. The flavor, however, didn't keep pace very well. It managed to hit just about every sour note in the coffee flavor spectrum, somehow achieving being both weak and bitter simultaneously. It was about 2/3 the price of the other coffees in the test, but in this case that wasn't a fair trade. Final grade: C.

So two of the three biggest national names are in a near dead heat for the top rated in the test. To break the deadlock, and because my hands hadn't quite started twitching from caffeine overload yet, I made one more cup of each and added two teaspoons of sugar to each, which most instant coffee drinkers I've ever known do religiously.

The sugar easily tipped the scales in Folger's favor. The sweetness blended right into the coffee taste and mellowed the bitterness almost completely. The Nescafe didn't play nearly as well with the sugar, with the coffee taste running off to hide somewhere else.

With the prices of all of these nearly equal, that makes the Folger's easily the best buy.