Gingerbread Instant Coffee

You know those coffee beans that you grind and brew at home? The beans they use to make ground coffee? The ones they use at your local coffee shop to make delicious coffee drinks?

The same beans are used to make instant coffee.

Of course, they’re not simply ground and brewed, with the end product put into containers. There’s a complicated process used to turn them into instant coffee, which can be reconstituted with the addition of hot water – and which obviously has a much longer shelf life than fresh coffee.

1. The roasting is done at a lower temperature, in order to ensure higher water content in the beans. (Caffeine is removed before roasting, if the producer is making decaf instant coffee.)
2. The roasted coffee beans are ground coarsely, to make sure the water used during brewing won’t get stuck in the grounds.
3. Special extraction equipment is used to brew the ground coffee, because the product has to be a sludgy coffee extract.
4. The extract is concentrated through cooling, evaporation or use of a centrifuge.
5. Gases collected during the last two processes are re-infused into the concentrate, to reinforce its aroma.
6. Finally, the concentrate is dehydrated, either with “spray-drying” (hot air turns it into fine powder or crystals) or freeze-drying (a repeated freezing process followed by drying in a vacuum chamber, which turns it into coffee granules or crystals).

Spray-drying is less expensive and faster; the freeze-drying process takes longer, costs more, and produces better-tasting coffee. Either way, though, the final product is still coffee, and it still acts like coffee once it’s inside your body even though it’s been heavily processed.