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! :)

"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

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.

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)

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

> 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.

> 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.

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. :)

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.

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...

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.

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!

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[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'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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.