Dalgona coffee
The first global lockdown trend: four hundred stirs of instant coffee, filmed by millions of people with nothing else to do.
You might remember it as whipped coffee
A trend people joined in with
- SourceNo single original
- MediaNot held by ViralWorld
What this was
Equal parts instant coffee, sugar and hot water, whipped by hand until it stiffens into a pale caramel foam, then spooned onto cold milk. It takes several hundred strokes and no equipment. The drink comes from Macau; South Korea gave it the name dalgona, after a sugar candy it resembles, when a television programme featured it in January 2020.
It first appeared in 2020, during short-form and streams.
It was the first thing the entire locked-down world did at the same time. The appeal was precisely that it was laborious and pointless: a task with a visible result, achievable with a store-cupboard jar of instant coffee, at a moment when a great many people had time and no way to spend it. Within weeks it was on the BBC's recipe site and in newspapers from Seoul to Delhi.
It became the reference point for everything that followed — banana bread, sourdough, whipped everything — and for a whole genre of pandemic reporting about food and boredom. Instant coffee sales rose. It is now dated, in the way things are that everyone did once.
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Related
Nothing related yet. Relationships are recorded where evidence supports them, not inferred from similarity.
Behind the recordWhere it came from
There is no original to identify: this spread through many separate posts at once rather than from a first one. ViralWorld holds no copy of it either — what it was, when it spread and what people called it is the record.
Nothing here is claimed to be the first version of this, because research established there was not one — it appeared in many places at once.
Not established. This index only names a creator where the evidence supports it.
- What happens
- Equal parts instant coffee, sugar and hot water, whipped by hand until it stiffens into a pale caramel foam, then spooned onto cold milk. It takes several hundred strokes and no equipment. The drink comes from Macau; South Korea gave it the name dalgona, after a sugar candy it resembles, when a television programme featured it in January 2020.