Making My Own Fancy Instant Coffee Can It Taste Good

Today, we're gonna be making our own instant coffee. And by that, as you can probably guess from the large machine here, I don't mean just getting a spoonful of this and adding some hot water. We are going to make the stuff in this jar, little granules, little powdered bits of instant coffee from whatever coffee we want. Now, why would we do this? I think the primary thing is, I've wanted to do this for ages because I wanna know how good can it taste. If I'm in charge of the coffee that gets brewed and the way that it gets brewed, and I can do a good job with the kind of freeze drying bit, can I make really tasty instant? Or is instant inherently struggling with the kind of quality thing because the process itself is always gonna kind of damage the quality of the whole thing? That's what we're gonna find out. So today, I'll walk you through what we're gonna do, the coffees we're gonna brew, how we're gonna brew them, how we're gonna prep them for this thing, and then we'll put them in this and I'll talk you through how these work because frankly, freeze dryers are cool. To talk about why and how we're gonna brew the coffee, it's important to understand some of the kind of maths of instant coffee. Now, when you are putting liquid coffee into a freeze dryer, it's gonna pull out all the water and it does it in a cool way, but if you put in, say, a liter of brewed filter coffee, well, that's about 1.5% strength and what you get out of that would be 15 grams of instant. That's it. Because instant's about 1.4, 1.5% strength, something like that. If you put in espresso, well, it's about eight, nine, 10% strength. Your one liter might yield you up to 100 grams of instant, but it's still a lot of water in there however you sort of do it. So let's get to the brews. We brewed pretty traditional V60s here. For the Kenyan coffee, classic 60 grams a liter, nice yield, classic kind of tasty brews, and then we froze them for reasons I'll explain in a minute. With the espresso, we pulled pretty normal shots, maybe a touch short, 18 grams of coffee in to about 42 grams of coffee out in about 30-ish seconds. A little bit of variance there because we had to pull a lot of shots of espresso for this whole thing. And then we froze them. Now, there's two reasons to freeze them. One is that if you put frozen stuff into a freeze dryer, the whole process is quicker, but there's another reason I thought to do it. I thought I was going to be clever and find a little hack to this whole thing because of an idea called freeze concentration. Now, if you've ever wanted to make clear ice, you might know about the idea of directional freezing. If you can get water to freeze from one direction only, if you imagine that sort of 3D thing, but if just the top was where the really cold was, if water freezes directionally, then it tends to push things out of solution down to the bottom, and you get the kind of clear, pure ice at the top. That sort of froze first. I thought if I put coffee in a clear ice cube maker, it may directionally freeze it and then freeze concentrated. These are your classic clear ice cube makers. You have these kind of insulated sides and bottom so that only the top experiences the cold, creates that directional freezing. That did not, that did not work in this situation. I did check and the coffee at the top of these things is just coffee. I hoped, you know, it might be sort of more concentrated at the bottom. That's not the case. With the espresso, we tried to buy the smallest one we could, which meant we have slightly ridiculous ice cubes. So as you can see from these melting already, these are skull ice cubes of pure espresso. We did filter the espresso, paper filter the espresso, because there's a lot of particles in there I didn't want in the finished instant. Obviously filter coffee, it's paper filtered anyway. If you look at what you get on an instant sort of filter paper, and you can just see on here, loads of fine particles that I just add bitterness and sort of unpleasantness. This was definitely worth doing for this project, I think. So this is the result. I thought it's share X, it's kind of 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 into the machine. This was an experiment and this was a failure. Should you be looking to replicate this at home, don't try and unfreeze concentrate your coffee, just freeze it, right? Now you want to freeze it before it goes in, but most people freeze it on the trays. And I will say, if you want to see a kind of a bigger scale, more professional approach to this whole thing, I'll link to Roaster Cat's video on making instant at the roastery where she works. Super interesting video, very helpful for us. Same freeze dryers, which I thought was kind of cool. They freeze the coffee straight in the trays that are inside this thing. Let me get one out. So here's our tray, which we're going to be putting the sort of frozen coffee into. Now, what we're going to do is break this up first. If you read the literature, and thankfully with instant coffee, there's a lot of literature. Well, they would freeze it into kind of pellet form or break it up into pellet form at least, and freeze it like that, rather than in sort of solid blocks. So what I'm going to do is subject our poor little espresso skulls to a blender and sort of do some crushed ice and sort of spread the ice out in the tray. We're not going to fill it up because we're not trying to get yield here. We're just trying to get some nice results and see what it tastes like. And then with my filtered coffee ice cubes, I will then do the same thing, blend them, smash them down to little pieces and put them onto a tray, and then they'll go into this thing. Now, if you don't know how freeze dryers work, it's very cool. First thing that you do is you get them cold. You put your stuff in and then they pull a vacuum. The vacuum that they'll pull is not a complete vacuum, but it's 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. So what you do is you take the frozen stuff, you put it in this vacuum. We're going to pull it down to, I think, like 0.3 millibars, which is not a lot of millibars. So there's very little sort of pressure left inside this sort of chamber here. Then if you gently heat the frozen coffee, the water in it sublimates. It goes straight from being a solid to being a gas. There's not enough pressure to keep it in its liquid form, and so it goes from the solid state to a gaseous state, and then they can condense it around the outsides of the machine, back into ice again, and then you've got dry stuff in the middle. It takes a while. It's not going to take ages because we're not going to put a huge amount in here because I'm not really that fussed about how much we get out. I just want to know how it tastes. That's the plan. Okay, we went back and we double-checked. It turns out the directional freezing worked on the filter coffee. Look at this. Oh, it's all gooey and sticky. Oh, really concentrated at the bottom there. We got like an ice pick and a mallet. I could try and get just the bottom section off, but I think that's unlikely. But I'll have a go, but it's unlikely. Either way, we'll break some of this up. We'll get it in the blender. We'll smush it down. We'll work it out. Now, when I switch this machine on, it gets really noisy. There's a big pump that pulls out all the air to make a vacuum, and then it's a sort of freezer running at the same time. So I'm not going to be able to talk once it's running. Once it's going, we're just going to leave it until everything's done, and we'll do our best to kind of capture what's going on in there. I mean, it'd be very easy. And with Instant, you can't help but wonder, you know, if you're trying to save time, what are you saving the time for? Where are you going to spend it? And I thought maybe a good way to spend it would be with this video's sponsor, which is Headspace. Now, when it comes to meditation, most of us don't need convincing that it's a good idea. We've heard the benefits of better sleep or less stress or more focus. We know it's a good thing. The challenge has been making it a regular part of your daily life, because when you do that, that's when you really get to see the benefits. And that's where Headspace comes in. Headspace is a service designed to help you build that habit. And they do it very cleverly. They do it in a whole bunch of different ways, because everyone's at a different stage on a different journey. You might be a beginner wanting just to understand the very basics of meditation. You might be a little bit more advanced and want something more, or to move meditation to a different part of your life. Do some walking meditations, let's say. Maybe you want to make it part of your morning routine. They actually have one, a guided meditation, around making a cup of coffee called Engage Your Senses. You should check that one out. For me, I see the biggest benefits in terms of quieting my mind. I have a busy, noisy mind. It is distracting itself constantly. When I build a habit around meditation, I find myself able to quiet the mind, pay attention, and focus, and be present. And that just makes life more enjoyable. If you want to see how Headspace might be helpful for you, well, you can try it out completely free for 60 days. All you have to do is click my link down in the description below, or you can use this QR code on screen. Thank you so much for Headspace for sponsoring this video. All right, I think we're done. It's a bit noisy. I'm going to turn it off and see what we've got. All right, so here are my trays of instant coffee. Confession. We actually took these out today, and this one, which is the filter coffee, had a little bit of residual moisture left. And you can see that in terms of when we've just given it one final drying. There's been some meltage 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 the espresso. But here it is. This funny little stuff. It's coffee. It's instant coffee. Now, you know, commercial instant coffee, they do a thing where they kind of agglomerate it into things that remind you of coffee grounds, even though they're obviously not ground coffee. But they do that on purpose. It may not be as fluffy as this is. Yeah, they definitely do a thing to make it look the way it does. It's time to taste it. That's the important thing. I'm going to make four cups of coffee. I'm going to make one cup of Nescafe, Alta Rica. I'm going to make one cup of instant, delicious Kenyan coffee. I'm going to make a pour-over of the same coffee, and then I'll 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, delightful. Like little crystals that just go, mm, salty. Salty. I've always felt that overly strong espresso manifests as salty. That's really weird. Quite bitter. Little bit of acidity in there. I will say a little bit. See how that fleshes out. Let's try the espresso blend. Should have a palate cleanser. Doesn't leave me with high hopes, if I'm honest. Also salty. Let's try that. More bitterness, for sure. Do I have to do the instant Nescafe as a comparison? Oh, crunchier. If you have this at home and you want to know what I'm talking about with the saltiness, that's available. Oh, powerfully bitter. Impressively bitter, actually. I'm going to make 150 mils of coffee, working at about 1.4% strength. You can work out the amount of solid material you'll need to have in each cup. Then you make up the rest up to 150 mils of hot water. We'll probably do the pour of the first. Weigh these out. Have a taste. I'm going to step out and Michael kindly is going to shuffle these up. I'm sure it'll be a complete mystery, which is which. I'm going to give them a taste. For those that dislike slurping, there'll be a separate audio track, slurp free. That's tasty. Texturally, it's quite nice. There's a little body, a little sweetness, but it has this weird rubberiness that is very off-putting. So it's not Nescafe. So there's Nescafe. And then our two efforts have this weird rubberness to them. I had to guess that's our Kenyan effort and that's the espresso blend. Really interesting that these two have this same off note. Now, I would say, and I know where this is coming from, and I would say with reasonable certainty that this ultimately just took too long to freeze. That's the problem. If you look at the literature on instant coffee manufacture, they're really in the camp of the faster you freeze it after extraction, the better it's going to taste. But this, I think, took too long. Maybe if you're brewing espresso, maybe there's a use for the whole freezy ball thing, the little frozen balls that people are using to trap more volatile aromatics. I'm not a huge proponent of that technique, but it could be an interesting way to additionally kind of chill down the espresso on the way to getting it cold as fast as possible. These would have taken quite a while to freeze because not only was it quite a lot of warm liquid, I mean, it was chilled to room temperature before I went to the freezer, but we're also trying to freeze them directionally, which would have slowed the process down a little bit too. So I think they just took way too long to freeze and you've got this off note in both of them that's, you know, totally different coffees. To have the same off note indicates you've got a process problem more than anything else. So we'll try it. We'll try it and we'll come back and we'll see if we can actually make it taste good. Another day, we've made some more instant. Is it going to be any good? So let's have a look. It looks quite different to the previous instance because this wasn't ground up sort of, you know, like smushed into funny bits of ice beforehand. This was just frozen as a block. And as a reminder, the goal was to freeze as fast as possible. And so it was shots pulled over the little frozen balls into frozen cups, then going onto a ice cold freezing tray and then straight into the freezer. So from brewing to ice was under 30 minutes, which is in the world of instant manufacture, way too slow. In the world of domestic best efforts, reasonable. I would say reasonable. Texture of this just looks really weird. I'm quite excited to touch it, to be honest. I'm going to, oh, oh yeah. It smells both quite nice and like, I believe now defunct, maybe not, English beef drink, Bovril. If you don't know Bovril, well done. If you do know Bovril, good times. Right. I'm going to brew some up. I just want to know if it's good. We used a different coffee again here. This might horrify some people. We used a pink bourbon, which isn't a bourbon variety, but it's a whole other thing for another day. So this is a nice pink bourbon coffee. We pulled it as espresso. Let me get 2.1 grams of instant into here, 150 mils of water. See what happens. It's time for a sip. The first thing to note is the sort of absence of bad flavor. The rubberiness that was very present yesterday, that kind of garden hose taste, is gone. There's none of that usual pain of instant. And so texture-wise, it feels quite light, but that's kind of the coffee. I think it's relatively light roast. It's got sweetness. I wouldn't say a lot of acidity, but some. That's not a bad cup of instant. I would say it's a decent cup of instant. I think it would probably be better if it had been brewed as filter and not espresso. I'm still not sold on the idea that espresso is the root to this, but the challenge you have of concentration, of getting enough solubles into the tray, is such a big problem. Instant manufacturers, however, can do a thing where they can break down the insoluble stuff in instant coffee and then extract that too, to get just more yield. It's not more flavor, it's just more stuff. And so they can get over 50%, so they can just extract more. So they need less beans to make 100 grams of instant than something that would taste really good would. So there's a massive inefficiency in our kind of target extraction, as well as the method of extraction. And if you wanna know why instant specialty is so expensive, that's a big reason why, right? We are capped at this sort of 25% range, I think for most instant manufacturers of specialty, you're not getting that sort of double yield that they would do in sort of commercial instant. And then your coffee's way more expensive, your roasting's probably better, the brewing is much harder, because you're trying to brew it to taste nice, not brew for maximum yield. So, you know, when I look at the price of specialty instant, it doesn't seem outrageous to me, especially now. This is surprisingly good, hearteningly good. You know, I feel like it's possible, I just don't know if the economics will ever truly make sense to make specialty instant kind of broadly available. But this is a surprising cup of coffee. This has been a super interesting experiment. I'm gonna make a bit more instant before we give this back, and sort of see how it ages, see how it does. And just to have a round is a fun thing to show people, like, hey, here's some instant that I made. Would you like a cup? Ooh, thank you again to Headspace for sponsoring this video. Don't forget the QR code is on screen, the link is in the description. Don't miss out on that 60-day free trial. Anyway, I would love to hear your thoughts down in the comments below. Is there something we should have tested? Is there a tweak, a hack that you know about when it comes to freeze-drying coffee that would have been interesting for us to know ahead of time? We could get another one in the future. If there's a really good, interesting idea, we can rent this again. So let us know down in the comments below. But for now, I wanna say thank you so much for watching. I hope you have a great day.