A brief history of instant coffee | Hacker News Reader

A brief history of instant coffee

worksinprogress.co

60 pointsadmp62 comments

Thanks for posting this!

I started using instant coffee in hot chocolate as a quick DIY mocha, mainly because the cost-caffeine ratio was sooooo much better than beans (ground or whole) and the mix of ingredients that doesn't trigger any reflux (unlike the 400 mg / serving powdered energy drink I had been guzzling).

Which is to say - this is a fun and interesting article about something I had just been taking for granted. It's really neat to learn about the trials and tribulations that folks went through to figure it out.

Thanks for posting it! :)

> ... and the mix of ingredients that doesn't trigger any reflux

Ah reflux! I drink way too much coffee since forever and recently asked my doc about it: he told me that if I had no reflux, then I simply shouldn't worry about it. Some people have reflux with coffee, others don't. I drink more coffee than 99% of the population and I get zero reflux. Since decades.

It's a cool article but in a way many coffee became instant coffee: as my coffee machine is often already warm (wife btw she's also a heavy coffee drinker), it's actually more instant to have my full auto coffee machine ground the beans and make a coffee than it'd take to boil water for an instant coffee. Same for the people doing the (very costly compared to beans) capsule coffee thing: it's ultra quick (and one of the reason capsule coffee like Nespresso conquered so many).

P.S: I'll try your mocha trick!

> I drink more coffee than 99% of the population

How much is that?

Piggybacking off your comment to advertise my new favourite. Very quick, and gets me having some of the protein powder I'm supposed to be drinking anyway. Does result in having to wash a blender though :) Blend: - Instant coffee (caffeinated or decaf) - 1/2 serve of chocolate flavoured protein powder (unfortunately this is obviously a vague/unhelpful quantity) - Milk - Ice cubes

That sounds really good! I'll have to give it a try :)

"I am very happy despite the rats, the rain, the mud, the draughts, the roar of the cannon and the scream of shells. It takes only a minute to light my little oil heater and make some George Washington Coffee . . . Every night I offer up a special petition to the health and well-being of Mr. Washington."

Is my favorite part of the article lol

According to that guy: Being shelled in a trench and drinking instant coffee is better than living at home and making coffee from coffee beans. I guess there's a niche for everyone to be happy.

i read it in Don Draper's voice

It's unfortunate that instant coffee has such as a bad reputation in the US. In Australia, instant coffee is very common (in the household); it's pretty good.

I would much prefer a cup of instant coffee to most coffee that is served at diners, brunch/lunch restaurants, etc. in the US. I prefer espresso still, but there's a lot of burnt tasting coffee in America.

In Australia all coffee is pretty good. I visited Sydney fora week a couple years ago for business and the lattes and espressos blew my mind. I have had good coffee but that is a whole different level. After I have always been picky about coffee (mostly espresso drinks) and now I am even more pickier thanks to the amazing coffee I had there.

In lots of Latin America instant is preferred. I don't remember but I think the historical explanation is that the whole beans were exported to wealthier markets, and the poorer consumers of coffee-growing regions had to settle for the cheaper product, which they eventually came to prefer.

As an aussie, I'd say instant is never good, it's the minimum acceptable coffee. If your coffee is worst than instant (yes, you LAX, how do you make coffee taste like literal dirt water!), then you should learn to make coffee properly!

The only coffee we keep around is Walmart's 100% Columbian Arabica instant, a freeze-dried coffee that tastes great and, despite recent rises in price, is under $10 for a 7 oz. jar. I sometimes mix it with a tablespoon of Stephen's Dark Chocolate cocoa mix (which contains dry milk) for a poor man's mocha.

Thanks for the article. I don’t know where it falls but I have been drinking the Nescafé Tasters Choice from Costco for two decades. Even that is getting a bit expensive so I have been scouring Asian stores for the instant Nescafé from Vietnam.

> which is why spray drying remains the dominant method

I don't think I've ever seen spray-dried. Even the cheap supermarket instant coffee is mostly freeze-dried in the UK I believe.

You can really see the power of marketing at play in instant coffee.

A lot of 'premium' branded instant coffee is ~£42/kg. That's £3/kg more than my premium, locally-roasted, single-estate Colombian coffee beans.

If you have more money than sense, there's even "Nescafe Gold Blend Cap Colombia" at £62/kg

I do drink instant, but I stick to supermarket own-brand 'gold' that is around £13-18/kg (freeze dried). You just accept it'll be bad, and always drink with sugar and milk.

I find the basic Nescafe has a distinct taste and not in a good way. I think a lot of people buy it for nostalgic reasons and not much else (well, excluding the brain-dead brand addicts)

> A lot of 'premium' branded instant coffee is ~£42/kg. That's £3/kg more than my premium, locally-roasted, single-estate Colombian coffee beans.

You need 7-10 times less instant coffee to make a cup though, so your beans are a lot more expensive in the end. From my experience, cup of coffee is either 2 grams of Nescafe Gold or 16 grams of beans.

The 7-10 times seems quite off. It’s pretty close to 5 times assuming common extraction yields about 20%. So instead of brewing 16g of coffee you could dissolve 3.2g of instant.

For what it's worth I just checked my store brand instant, and the serving suggestion is 1.9 grams.

All depends on the concentration you are trying to achieve. If you brew 16g of coffee, you'd usually end up with around 260g of finished brew.

> A lot of 'premium' branded instant coffee is ~£42/kg. That's £3/kg more than my premium, locally-roasted, single-estate Colombian coffee beans.

That weight comparison doesn't make sense. How many cups of coffee do you get from your beans versus the instant? I just checked the jar I have here for my lazy weekends, it's ~2g per cup of coffee (rounding up, it's a bit under 200g and it makes about 100 cups). So a kg of instant would be around 500 cups of coffee. I don't think your 1kg of beans will produce that many cups.

Doh, of course! I do consider instant about 10x less enjoyable though so I do I think the comparison holds on one level

In terms of the volume of the final beverage, 1kg of instant coffee goes a lot further than 1kg of whole bean coffee does.

I don't measure coffee by weight when making the stuff (I use the eyebolic method with the coffee grinder, and the equally-imprecise heaping spoonful method with instant), but some homework suggests that it takes ~60g of whole bean coffee, or ~9g of instant coffee, to produce 1 liter of beverage.

If a coffee cup holds 300ml (as the normal US-centric one I picked from my cabinet does), then when we use your prices we get:

~£0.702 per cup from premium, locally-roasted, single-estate Columbia coffee beans

~£0.1134 per cup from 'premium' instant coffee.

...which makes instant a whole heckuva lot less expensive to drink. :)

you hardly get good instant coffee in the US.

however in the UK the premium supermarkets have really good instant coffee i.e M&S and Waitrose.

it's never instant because boiling water takes sooooo longgggg. apparently uk teakettles are faster due to voltage differences? i want to look for a usb-c solution sometime

U. K. 240v vs. 120v in the U. S., twice the voltage == twice the amperage (EDIT: oops, wattage, for the same amps) == half the time to boiling. I will note that doubling the voltage will still not make it "instant". For that I think you need liquid oxygen[0].

[0] https://improbable.com/2018/10/26/a-look-back-at-george-gobl...

Twice the voltage == half the amperage for the same wattage. Are UK kettles higher wattage?

Actually yes, around double the wattage. It's one of the things English people notice when they move to the US (true!).

3000 glorious watts

US circuits are about 15 amps; UK ones similar - but twice the volts.

So a US kettle is about 1500 watts, a UK one 3000.

You can get commercial water boilers in the US if you need.

or just use an insta-hot tap which is infinitely faster than an electric kettle. or a plain old kettle on an induction cooktop which will also be faster than a single purpose electric kettle.

You can also simply keep water near boiling.

All the time? That's very inefficient, especially when running your boiler outside heating season and without a vacuum flask.

The actual solution is to boil small quantities of water. I can boil one cup in 90 seconds or so, even with the 120v handicap.

Sure, but efficiency wasn't the goal here. Anyway I use hot water enough (~6-10 times daily) that I don't mind spending extra for it

Or boil a larger quantity and fill it into a thermos. Perfectly fine for instant coffee throughout the day. (And without the coffee stains in the thermos.)

The UK is not an outlier here. Much of the world has the same voltage.

In electric kettles or a microwave or even in a moka pot or another small container on a decent induction stove it's just 2-3 minutes. There was a video I can't find where they increased the voltage or something for a kettle and at one point it boiled the water in like 10-15 seconds.

Technology Connections?

https://youtu.be/INZybkX8tLI

It was another, shorter video, not by TC. Just different voltages (or maybe there were other variables) one after the other until the water boiled really quickly and afterwards the kettle blew a fuse or broke (can't remember).

I guess many people have tried doing something like this. But I'll watch TC's video, too - he hasn't disappointed me so far.

Edit: Watched it. Not the same video, but this one had a lot more info and troubleshooting than what the one I had in mind.

Of all the things I have cooked on my induction cooktops over the years, boiling water fast is what I miss when I travel and have to use electric coils.

The good news is that boiling water is not functionally necessary since the extraction was done up front. I drink it cold or with warm water. Boiling is hotter than I want to drink anyway.

If there's significant scale at the bottom it's possible it's making your kettle materially less efficient. If you put in like a cup of vinegar and a cup of water (you could probably dilute it more than that), heat it up and swish it around (it doesn't need to be boiling), it should all come off.

Indeed. I have a Nespresso machine for when I need coffee quickly. As soon as I press the button, hot water flows in a trickle. It’s certainly not boiling but it’s an ideal temperature as a hot drink.

I found that 160F to 180F is enough for instant coffee, depending on personal taste and what you feel like at that moment. I have an electric kettle that has a several buttons for different temperatures, and heating only to 180F saves time over heating to boiling, plus I can drink it right away.

Yep, all the instant coffee jars I’ve seen have a note to use hot but NOT boiling water. And I’ve noticed that using too hot water can even spoil the taste a bit.

I usually turn off the kettle when the noise starts noticeably changing. This usually is something between 70-80℃.

For real instant: install a hot water tap. It has a small boiler under the sink that keeps the water at near boiling. I've got one and it's great - instant tea any time.

I considered this when I rebuilt my kitchen last year but the price was obscene - starting at $1600 AUD installed.

I bought one of these for $79 instead and I’ve been perfectly happy with it.

https://www.kmart.com.au/product/digital-hot-water-dispenser...

Mine was about $1500NZD. That didn't seem like a big outlay when redoing the whole kitchen for nearly $60k.

K-Mart? The dream of the 90s lives on in the land down under apparently...

Does it? It only takes like 2 min for my electric kettle to boil. If I was a more avid coffee/tea drinker, I’d get one of the always heated hot water dispensers that are common in Japanese households (def one of the appliances I miss since moving back to the US). Then you never have to wait.

If you’re brewing from ground you really don’t want boiling 212F water as you’ll burn the grounds. I do my pour over at 185F and get smooth ready to drink hot coffee with no/low acidity.

If you (for some reason) want low-acidity coffee, it’s better to just get a darker roast (if you can stand the taste defects).

Ideal brewing temperature depends on a lot of factors but even ultralight roasts don’t require anything near boiling.

I just use the microwave TBH. 60s and done.

My completely unremarkable microwave is rated at 1800W whereas my unremarkable electric kettle is rated at 1200W.

I'm in the UK but I have a kettle that lets you pick the temperature. I usually just use 50C (122F) for instant if I'm having it black, or 70C (158F) for a splash of milk. Boiling water would make an already miserable experience far more miserable.

This guy (sunshine) designed a 3d-printed mocha pot that boils in half the time over a flame. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LuZiqLb70tM

USB-C PD has far lower wattage than the wall outlet anywhere in the world. Now I want someone to build a kettle that accepts a J1772 connection (for charging electric vehicles). That’s nowadays more common than any 240V NEMA outlets.

technologyconnections has connected several things to his car charger, including kettles

I just made a cup of tea, here in the States[1], using science (which means I wrote it down).

I started with 300ml of water that I measured at 68.5F.

I dumped that into the Sunbeam Hot Shot[2] "hot water dispenser" that lives on my countertop (which is labeled as using 1450 Watts).

I pushed the go button and started a clock. It took 1 minute, 29 seconds to reach what I considered to be a rolling boil.

That's pretty good, I think. I could futz around with keeping a hot electric kettle going during the day and maybe save some time on everything after the first cup, but meh. This seems quick-enough, to me, and also avoids all chances of flash-boiling water in the microwave[3].

---

But that's not the interesting part. The interesting part is the math.

At my elevation, I added about 100kJ of heat to the water over those 89 seconds.

If the input power is 1450W (I didn't measure that; I just read it from the back), then ~23% of it was lost. Wherever it went (heating the appliance itself, evaporative cooling, whatever), that power was not included the final state of the water. That's hugely inefficient as a percentage.

But if electricity costs $0.19 per kWh, then I only spent about 7/10ths of 1 cent to boil this 300ml cup of water. (I could add or subtract 23% and it would still be an irrelevant part of my power bill.)

The cheap store-brand black tea cost me $0.0218 per bag.

So a cup of hot tea was a bit less than 3 cents. Not bad!

---

[1]: The freedom to use cursed units

[2]: The Sunbeam machine is no longer available, which sucks. They're simple electromechanical devices with no smarts at all and only a couple of moving parts, and I recommend one to anyone with 120v outlets who likes hot beverages one-cup-at-a-time.

[3]: I did that once. I reached into the microwave for a cup of hot water and it boiled explosively as soon as I moved it. It was very sudden and surprisingly painful. The first-degree burns healed up over the next couple of days. 0/10; worth taking extra steps to avoid.

I was thinking about this more.

A cup of tea is a bit less than 3 cents. The cost of water from the tap isn't enough to be worth calculating (and in a world of shortages, I live in a region where we have too much water). Heating is about 1/4 of the total cost, which is significant.

But that leaves me with a dirty cup that eventually needs to be washed.

So how much does it cost to clean the cup?

Starting with my kitchen faucet that had been doing nothing for hours, I started a clock and turned on the hot water and measured the volume that came out before it became warm-enough-to-wash-some-stuff. It took about 18 seconds and 1.6l to get to right about 110f, which my fingers determined to be "warm enough". The incoming water temperature is 58f right now. (The water heater is a recently-installed resistive unit.)

Raising the temperature of this 1.6l of water cost me almost exactly 1 cent, and that's all waste energy -- that's what it takes to get the process started.

Then I have to wash the cup. I didn't work through that, but I've done it enough that I can estimate that it takes me about 20 seconds total to scrub tea stains from a coffee cup and make it white again if I'm in a hurry about it. No big deal, time-wise.

But because I'm focused on washing the cup more than I am on conserving energy, I usually let the water run while I wash up the cup. That's another 20 seconds of running the hot tap (for 38 seconds total), adding another 1.13 cents (or 2.13 cents total).

---

So that's our minimum: 2.13 cents, just to heat the water to wash the cup with 38 seconds of running it. Maybe, some days.

But realistically, it's likely more than that. I've measured incoming water temperature to be as low as 38f here[1]. The water heater itself is set to 140f, and as a practical matter when I wash a single coffee cup I generally use 100% hot water.

In that worst case, it's more like 4.23 cents to wash a cup. (Again, if I'm hurrying. I don't always hurry.)

---

So the total cost of a single cup of tea, for me, is somewhere in the realm of between 5 and 7 cents. Heating the water is by far the biggest contribution to that cost.

And merely washing the cup by hand is a significant cost contribution at one end of the scale, and is the largest contribution at the other end.

That's surprising to me. These numbers still don't matter much (how many cups of tea do I drink in a month? or in a year? how often do I actually wash that cup?), but it's surprising enough that I think I'll start using the dishwasher for these things.

The dishwasher is a bit cheaper, and a lot lazier.

[1]: I'm not redoing worst-case for making the tea itself, because the water for tea-making comes from a large countertop water filter that connects to the kitchen faucet. The contents are generally always near room temperature, at the behest of the ambient environment that is controlled by a gas forced air furnace or aircon. I'm not getting that far into the weeds. :)

Most people boil too much water. Get a kettle that can take a smaller amount of water and then boil what you need. If that’s not good enough, you can get a kettle that keeps water warm and then you don’t need so much energy to boil it (or figure out a routine or trick to turn the kettle on earlier, eg a teasmade). If you want to throw money at the problem USB-C is not the answer (how does that even make sense??) but you could (a) get a 240V socket (eg NEMA 6-15) in your US kitchen and rewire a 15A 240V European kettle to the appropriate plug. Or get an impulse labs induction hob set. Their whole selling point is using batteries to be able to put more power into boiling water than they can get from the wall.

>If you want to throw money at the problem USB-C is not the answer (how does that even make sense??)

I thought maybe it could use a capacitor or something? I'm not an electrical engineer -- all I know is we have half the voltage here, and I've seen things like USB plates before -- the older type of USB... and USB C can power a laptop.

So I thought, since the English love their goddamn tea so much, they'd probably have a USB-C teakettle if such a thing is possible, and then I wouldn't need an adapter (if an adapter is even possible for higher voltage appliances like that).

Mine takes four minutes. Minutes are short in the morning in America :-(

The voltage isn’t really the limiting thing (you actually get 220 volts to almost any American home for some appliances like A/C or cookers). The issue is that the regular 110V circuits aren’t meant for more than 15A and that then limits the amount of power coming from your wall. If you change the voltage, you’re still bottlenecked by the power from your wall (and it is that power that is almost all turned into heat to boil the water).

A capacitor is too small but you could imagine a kettle with a battery to deliver more power than it can get out of the wall.

I shouldn’t have been snarky about your USB-C comment. I’m sorry.

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