Making My Own Fancy Instant Coffee: Can It Taste Good?

- Today we are going to prepare our own

instant

coffee

. And by that, as you can probably guess from the big machine here, I don't mean just taking a spoonful of this and adding some hot water. We're going to make what's in this jar, little granules, bits of

instant

coffee

powder, well, whatever coffee we want. Now, why would we do this? I think the main thing is that I've wanted to do this for a long time because I want to know how

good

it can

taste

. If I'm in charge of what coffee is brewed and how it's brewed, and I can do a

good

job with the freeze-drying type, can I make really tasty instant coffee?

Or is instant inherently struggling with a quality type of thing because the process itself is always going to hurt the quality of everything? That's what we're going to find out. So today I will explain to you what we will do, the coffees we will prepare, how we will prepare them and how we will prepare them for this. And then we'll put you through this and I'll explain how they work because, frankly, freeze dryers are great. To talk about why and how we're going to make coffee, it's important to understand some of the math behind instant coffee.

Now, when you put liquid coffee in a freeze dryer, it will take out all the water. And he does it in a great way. But if you put in, say, a liter of filtered coffee, well, that's about 1.5% concentration. And what you would get from that would be 15 grams of snapshot. That's all. Because the instant one has approximately 1.4 or 1.5% concentration, something like that. If you put espresso in it, well, that's about 8, 9, 10% concentration. So 1 liter can make up to 100 grams of instant, but still, well, there's still a lot of water in there no matter how you do it.

So let's get to the beers. Here we brew quite traditional V60 for Kenyan coffee, the classic 60 grams per liter, good yield, the classic type of tasty beers. And then we freeze them for reasons I'll explain in a minute. With espresso, we took pretty normal shots, maybe a little short, 18 grams of coffee for about 42 grams of coffee in about 30 seconds. A little variation because we had to take a lot of shots of espresso for all of this. And then we freeze them. Now there are two reasons to freeze them. One is that if you put frozen things in a freeze dryer, the whole process goes faster.

But there is another reason why I thought about doing it. I thought I was going to be clever and find a little trick to all of this because of an idea called freezing concentration. Now, if you've ever wanted to make clear ice, you may know the idea of ​​directional freezing. If you can make the water freeze only from one direction, if you imagine that kind of thing in 3D, but if only the top was where the cold was actually, if the water freezes in one direction, then it tends to take out the Solution things down. down and you get the kind of pure, clear ice on top that froze first.

I thought that if I put coffee in a clear ice cube maker, I could freeze it directionally and then freeze it concentrated. These are the classic transparent ice cube makers. It has these sort of insulated sides and bottom so that only the top experiences the cold that creates that directional freezing. That didn't... (sigh) that didn't work in this situation. I checked. And the coffee on top of these things is just coffee. I was hoping, you know, that I could be more focused in the background. That is not the case. With the espresso we tried to buy the smallest one we could, which meant we had slightly ridiculous ice cubes. (laughs) Yes.

As you can see from these melts, these are pure espresso skull ice cubes. We filter the espresso, we filter it with paper, because there are a lot of particles in there that I didn't want in the final instant. Obviously filtered coffee, it's a paper filter anyway. If you look at what you get in a kind of instant filter paper, you can see a lot of fine particles here that just add bitterness and something unpleasant. I think this was definitely worth doing for this project. So this is the result. I thought I would share. It's something interesting.

So now it's time to talk about the machine because we're not actually going to put these ice cubes as they are in the machine. This was an experiment. And this was a failure. If you want to replicate this at home, don't try freezing coffee concentrate. Just freeze it. Good? Now you want to freeze it before it goes in. But most people freeze it in the trays. And I will say that if you want to see a more professional, larger-scale approach to all of this, I'll link to Roaster Kat's video on how to make instant in the toaster, which she works on.

Super interesting video, very helpful for us. Same freeze dryer, which I thought was pretty good. They freeze the coffee right in the trays inside this thing. Let me take one out. So here is our tray, in which we will put the type of frozen coffee. Now what we're going to do is break this down first. If you read the literature, and luckily for instant coffee, there's a lot of literature, well, they would freeze it into sort of granules or at least break it down into granules and freeze it like that instead of into sort of solid blocks. .

So what I'm going to do is put our poor espresso skulls through a blender, make some crushed ice, and spread the ice into the tray. We're not going to fill it because we're not trying to get performance here. We're just trying to get good results and see what it

taste

s like. And then with my filter coffee ice cubes, I'll do the same thing. Blend them, shred them into small pieces and put them on a tray, and then they go into this thing. Now, if you don't know how freeze dryers work, that's great. The first thing you do is cool them.

You put your things inside. And then they do the vacuuming. The vacuum they will generate is not a complete vacuum, but they are very, very, very low pressures. Now, at very low pressures, water boils at much, much, much lower temperatures. This is, I think, whose law is that? Someone's law. It is not Boyle's law. Whose law is it? So what you do is you take your frozen stuff and you put it in this vacuum cleaner. I think we'll get it down to 0.3 millibars, which is not many millibars. So there is very little pressure left inside this type of chamber.

And then, if you gently heat the frozen coffee, the water in it sublimes. It goes directly from being a solid to being a gas. There is not enough pressure to keep it in liquid form. And so it goes from the solid state to the gaseous state, and then they can condense it around the outside of the machine again to turn it into ice. And then you have dry stuff in between. It takes a while. It won't take long because we're not going to put a huge amount in here, because I'm actually not that worried about how much we're going to get out.

I just want to know how it tastes. This is the plan. Well. We went back and double checked. It turns out that directional freezing worked on filter coffee. Watch this. Oh, it's all sticky and sticky. Everyone really focused down there. We have like an ice pick and a sledgehammer. You could try removing just the bottom section. But I think that's unlikely. But I will try. But it is unlikely. Either way, we'll split some of this up. We will put it in the blender. We will crush it. We'll fix it. Now when I turn this machine on, it becomes very loud.

There's a big pump that pulls all the air out to create the vacuum, and then it's kind of like a freezer running at the same time. So I won't be able to talk once it's up and running. And once it's working, we need to leave it until it's all done. And we will do our best to capture what happens there. It may not be very easy. And with the moment, you can't help but wonder. You know, if you're trying to save time, what are you saving it for? Where are you going to spend it? And I thought maybe a good way to spend it would be with this video sponsor, which is Headspace.

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Confession: In fact, we took them out today and this one, which is the filtered coffee, had a little residual moisture left. And you can see that in terms of when we've given it a final dry, there's been some melting here. So because it's 98.6% water, it seems like drying it is a little bit more difficult than something that's 90% water, which is espresso. But here it is, these fun little things. Is coffee! It's instant coffee. Now, you know, commercial instant coffee, they do this thing where they clump it into things that remind you of coffee grounds, even though they're obviously not ground coffee.

But they do it on purpose. It may not be as fluffy as this one. Yes, they definitely do something to make it look the way it does. It's time to try it. That's what's important. I'm going to make four cups of coffee. I'm going to make a cup of Nescafé Alta Rica. I am going to prepare a cup of delicious instant Kenyan coffee. I'm going to pour the same coffee and then make a cup of this, which was an espresso blend, but then, you know, like a filter coffee. We haven't done a direct taste test. Texturally: delicious!

Like little crystals that just say Mmm. Salty! Salty. I've always felt that too strong espresso comes across as salty. That's really strange. Quite bitter. A little acidity there. I'll say a little. Watch that disappear. Let's try the espresso blend. I should have...maybe taken a palate cleanser. It doesn't leave me with high hopes, if I'm honest. Also salty, I guess there. More bitterness for sure. Do I have to do the instant Nescafé as a comparison? Oh, crispier. If you have someone at home and want to know what I'm talking about with salty, it's available. Oh, powerfully bitter.

Impressively bitter actually, wow. I am going to prepare 150 ml of coffee, working at a concentration of approximately 1.4%. You can calculate the amount of solid material you will need in each cup and then top up the rest to 150 ml of hot water. We'll probably serve the first one, weigh them and taste. I'm going to go out and Michael will kindly mix them up. I'm sure it will be a complete mystery which is which. And then I'll give you a taste. For those who don't like slurping, there will be a separate non-slurping audio track. (slurps) That's delicious. (slurps) The texture is quite nice.

There is a little body. You know, it has a little bit of sweetness, but it has that strange rubbery feeling that is very unpleasant. So it's not Nescafe. (sips) So that's Nescafé. And then both of our efforts have this weird, rubbery thing going on. If I had to guess, that would be our effort in Kenya. And that's the espresso blend. Really interesting that these two have the same off note. Now, I would say I know where this is coming from, and I would say with reasonable certainty that it ultimately took too long to freeze. That's the problem.

If you look at the literature on

making

instant coffee, they're really in the camp of the quicker you freeze it after extraction, the better it will taste. But I think this took too long. Maybe if you're

making

espresso, maybe there's a use for the whole frozen balls thing, the little frozen balls that people use to trap more volatile aromatics. I'm not a big proponent of that technique, but it could be an interesting way to chill the espresso further so that it cools as quickly as possible. They would have taken a long time to freeze because not only was it a large amount of warm liquid, but it was cooled to room temperature before going into the freezer.

But we were also trying to freeze them directionally, which would have also slowed down the process a bit. So I think they took too longfreeze. And you have this off note on both. That's, you know, totally different coffees having the same unpleasant note indicates that you have a process problem more than anything else. Then we will try him. We will try it and we will return. And we'll see if we can really make it taste good. Another day. We've made some more instant ones. It will be good? So let's take a look. It looks quite different from the previous case because this wasn't crushed, you know, like crushed into fun ice chunks beforehand.

This was simply frozen as a block. And as a reminder, the goal was to freeze as quickly as possible. And that's how the drinks were placed on top of the frozen balls, in frozen glasses, then on a frozen tray, and then directly into the freezer. So from brew to ice took less than 30 minutes, which, in the world of instant manufacturing, is too slow; in the world of national best efforts, reasonable, I would say reasonable. The texture of this looks really strange. I'm really excited to play it, to be honest. I'm going to, oh, oh yeah. It smells quite good and at the same time, I think the English meat drink Bovril is now gone, maybe not.

If you don't know Bovril, well done. If you know Bovril, good times. Good? (laughs) I'm going to prepare them. I just want to know if it's good. Here we used a different coffee again. This might horrify some people. We used a rosé bourbon, which is not a variety of bourbon, but that's another thing for another day. This is a nice rosé bourbon coffee. We prepare it as espresso. Let me put here 2.1 grams of instant, 150 ml of water. See what happens. It's time for a sip. (slurps) The first thing to notice is the sort of absence of bad taste.

The gum that was very present yesterday, that kind of garden hose flavor, has disappeared. There is none of that usual instant pain. And texture-wise, it feels quite light. But that's coffee. I think it's a relatively light roast. It has sweetness. I wouldn't say a lot of acidity, but some. Not a bad cup of instant. I'd say it's a decent cup of instant. I think it would probably be better if it had been brewed as a filter and not an espresso. I'm still not sold on the idea that espresso is the way to this. But the challenge of concentration, of getting enough solubles in the tray, is a huge problem.

Instant coffee manufacturers, however, can do something that allows them to break down the insoluble substances in instant coffee and then extract them as well, for a higher yield. It's not more flavor. It's just more things. And so they can get more than 50%. So they can extract more. You know, they need fewer beans to make 100 grams of instant than something that tastes very good like wood. So there is a huge inefficiency in our type of target, both in the extraction and in the extraction method. And if you want to know why instant specialty is so expensive, that's one of the main reasons, right?

We're limited to this kind of 25% range. I think for most specialty instant makers, they don't get the kind of double the performance that they would get in a commercial sort of instant. And then the coffee is a lot more expensive, the roast is probably better, the brewing is a lot harder because you're trying to brew it to taste good, not to get maximum performance. So, you know, when I look at the price of the special instant, it doesn't seem outrageous to me, especially now. This is surprisingly good, encouragingly good. You know, I feel like it's possible.

I just don't know if it will ever really make economic sense to make instant specialty widely available. But this is an amazing cup of coffee. This has been a super interesting experiment. I'm going to do a little bit more instant before I return this and see how it ages and see how it works, just to have a round as a fun thing to show people like, "Hey, here's an instant that Do you want a cup?" Oh, thanks again to Headspace for sponsoring this video. Don't forget the QR code is on the screen. Don't miss out on that 60-day free trial. comments below.

Is there anything we should have tried? Are there any settings, any tricks that you know, when it comes to freeze drying coffee, that we would have been interested in knowing beforehand? really good and interesting idea, we can rent it again. Let us know in the comments below. But for now, I will say thank you very much for watching. And I hope you have a great day.