From Bean to Jar: The Surprising Science Behind Your Instant Coffee

-Karthik Gurumurthy

Ever wondered how they turn perfectly good coffee into those little crystals that dissolve instantly? Let me break it down:

When coffee arrives at the factory, it looks just like what you’d find at the grocery store. They start with green beans, roast them to whatever color Maxwell House or Yuban wants, blend different beans for the right flavor, and grind them up.

But here’s where it gets wild – instead of making a few cups like we do at home, these factories brew MASSIVE amounts, like 1,500 to 2,000 pounds at once! Then they send this coffee through high-pressure, high-temperature tubes that evaporate some water, creating super concentrated “coffee liquor.”

From there, they have two different ways to make instant coffee:

The cheaper way is just drying with heat. They pour the coffee concentrate through these gigantic cylindrical dryers (about 100 feet high and 60 feet across!) heated to 500°F. By the time the liquid reaches the bottom, all the water has evaporated, leaving behind powder that gets packed into jars.

The fancier method is freeze-drying. First, they freeze the coffee liquor into blocks, then break these into granules of whatever size they want. These granules go into a vacuum dryer box where something really cool happens – sublimation! That’s when frozen water skips the liquid stage and transforms directly into vapor. The vacuum makes water boil at lower temperatures, which protects the flavor.

The end result? Coffee solids that instantly dissolve in hot water for a quick cup. The freeze-dried stuff tends to taste better because the lower temperatures in the vacuum don’t damage the flavor as much.

So next time you’re stirring that instant coffee, you can appreciate the weirdly complex science behind your convenient cup! 

I love the degree coffee that you get in Southern part of India. It is referred to as Kaapi which doesn’t have any letters compared to coffee.