In January, we will be releasing our first production run of instant coffee, which will be a natural processed Maragogype from Finca Hartmann in Panama.
I have always been quite openly negative about the instant coffee proposition. Essentially, this cynicism could be boiled down to what I perceived the value proposition to be based on what I had experienced – the most expensive per serving format for the lowest quality of a given coffee. I always felt there was too much reliance on the benefits of convenience as creating a lot of value. There are definitely specific environments where this convenience is great, such as on a camping trip, a plane flight, or in a hotel room.
It should be noted that, from a brewing point of view, instant coffee represents perhaps the biggest challenge out of any format. Obviously, for the customer, it’s the simplest, easiest way to make a coffee, but for this to be achieved, it means the most amount of processing out of any coffee format. It also is the biggest challenge from a chemistry and physics point of view. You have to brew the coffee and then dehydrate it, leaving you with the remnants of a previous brew. This means instant is effectively always twice brewed. This is a much bigger challenge than, say, capsule coffee, which is essentially a pre-prepared ground coffee dose flushed with nitrogen. The customer then adds the water for the first time when they brew. This is very similar to most of the other ways we all make coffee, from espresso in cafés to a pour-over or AeroPress at home.
I recently was asked to look at a coffee project, and part of that entailed revisiting instant coffee and tasting what was now available around the world. The samples from a company in Calgary, Canada, were good enough to change my mind on instant coffee. The samples were a range of coffees that immediately surpassed my expectations. Firstly, there was not the savoury instant taste that's so common – I call it a “beefy” taste. Secondly, there was more acidity, and thirdly, the character of each coffee was present. The samples really surprised me and changed my mind on instant coffee.
When speaking to Ben of Hasty Coffee, he explained the steps they had taken to process instant coffee from a quality perspective. There are multiple variables and details that can be looked at in an instant coffee process. How is the coffee itself brewed for the first time, and with what water? How is the coffee roasted? How is it dehydrated and freeze-dried? It was clear that a few key factors make the difference. Firstly, appreciating that the process does reduce acidity and make a coffee taste darker means that roasting considerably lighter than you would for any other method works really well. From our point of view, we roasted our trial batch of Villa Teresa significantly lighter than we normally would. Then there is the soft, mineral-controlled water Ben and his team use to brew the coffee. Perhaps one of the biggest factors is striving to reduce oxygen exposure. The oxygen exposure is responsible for that beefy taste in a lot of specialty instants.
I have changed my mind on what instant can do for specialty coffee from a quality perspective. It still has the price-per-serving challenge – I think it’s still too high. I also think there’s more progress that can be made with instant coffee around process and volatiles. The volatile aromatics of brewing the coffee fresh are not there in the instant, but I think the results are very good, and I would choose the brew over many of the batch brews I have been served in many specialty shops. If you're subscribed to our marketing email list, we’ll be sending you a code to try a couple of cups of a trial run on us. Oh, and like all coffee, make sure you brew it with good water!
Best,
Maxwell