For coffee aficionados, it can be hard to remember the days before fair-trade, adjective-heavy specialty coffee. But before Counter Culture, or even Starbucks, there were first-wave roasters peddling steel cans of grounds (gasp!), the likes of which are now only seen on visits to your parents' house.

So to see if any of these coffees are actually good to the last drop, we asked Lorenzo Perkins, certified coffee instructor at Cuvée and executive council member of the Barista Guild of America, to put five of the biggest coffee brands through the same rigorous blind-tasting process that his roasting company applies to their own beans.

"This is actually something I think all my colleagues should do. When you're only drinking specialty coffee, you lose that global perspective."