Coffee in an instant

What is instant coffee?

Overly simplified: Its freeze-dried, super brewed, mass produced, coffee shards!

But for real, its a lot more than just a few extra steps, think more of it like the ready meal of the coffee world.

Starting off, instant coffee isn’t produced like that of normal beans for café or home use, instead its all done in large factories with bigger machines than you can imagine!

These Factories take in green coffee and roast it on mass in an incredibly large roaster and then once cooled, the beans are ground in a very large mill and then brewed under high pressure and high temperature, similar to that of espresso. (kind of but not massively)

This coffee concentrate is then poured out onto a large conveyer and spread thin, ready for freezing.

The concentrate is then frozen completely and smashed up into the familiar shape which we see in the jar as these tiny shards of coffee.

Next: some science!

These shards still have some water content within, so to remove this these shards are passed through a strong vacuum at around 60 degrees Celsius, at this pressure the frozen water within the granules is evaporated through sublimation, this is where the solid frozen water is turned straight to a gas rather than melting into a liquid, as melting the shards would release flavour from the coffee.

After this whole process the coffee granules are then packaged, jars labelled and shipped out!

Once in your hands and a tea spoon of these granules in your cup its as simple as adding boiled water to rehydrate these lil guys and enjoy the pre brewed coffee whenever you want!

Also a quick hack for anyone finding their instant coffee super bitter or harsh! You can add a little tiny bit of salt to take the edge off that nasty kick.

Bare in mind this strong flavour is mainly caused by the use of Robusta beans in the production of instant coffee.

Robusta is one of the two main strains of coffee, the other being Arabica. Robusta is known for its harsher taste compared to that of Arabica and is often much cheaper to buy as its grown in far more areas due to its “robust” nature.

Weekly Recipe/Try something new!

Try using instant coffee for something different this week, if your fancy it, try this Dalgona coffee recipe:

2 tbsp caster sugar, 2 tbsp instant coffee, 2 tbsp cold water.

Wisk this tiny mix either by hand or with a mixer till it foams to form firm peaks like meringue.

Then simply pour your choice of milk/alternative milk with some ice into a glass and pour your whisked mix on top, stir well and enjoy!

I hope you’ve enjoyed this and learned something new about this kitchen cupboard staple. Have a great week and some even better coffees!

FYI this post is a repost from our first website but needed moving over and was only sent to 6 people originally