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Comment by gib444 | Hacker News Reader

> 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)

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> 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

> 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.

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. :)

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