What is Instant Specialty coffee?
Roasted specialty coffee that is carefully and intentionally extracted and then freeze dried to create the highest quality Instant Specialty coffee possible.
What is specialty coffee?
Technically it is arabica coffee with a Q score of 80+ as scored by a Coffee Quality Institute certified Q Grader. Practically and holistically it is a quest for quality from a segment of the coffee industry.
What makes Instant Specialty coffee better?
Lots of very small and very big things. Primarily though:
- The quality of the coffee the roasters provide. This is meant holistically to include every step of the coffee’s journey prior to us receiving it as roasted whole bean.
- The coffee used by big commercial instant coffee producers can be extremely low in quality.
- Our extraction system, knowledge, years of experience and IP. We have a quality, not a quantity, focus.
- Commercial instant coffee manufacturers can extract up to 60% of the coffee. Did you even know that was possible? They use extreme pressures and temperatures. Some use chemical solvents other than water. While extracting so much is exciting from a yield perspective, the quality of flavour and aroma suffers.
- Our freeze drying process. We have launched a joint venture with Australia’s leading freeze drying technology innovators and are the exclusive coffee processing arm of their operations.
- Commercial instant coffee is often dried by spraying the concentrated, brewed coffee into towers in excess of 270c. This high heat drying process significantly impacts on the flavours and aromas of the coffee. The freeze drying process on the other hand is a very low impact drying process that never goes above 40c.
But it’s still instant coffee!
Like most things if the intention is for quality, it can be. The flavours and aromas of your coffee are mostly maintained due to the extraction and freeze drying process we have developed.
The beautiful thing about Instant Specialty coffee is that the extraction is completed by us, at the perfect moment and the result is freeze dried in time. As you as a consumer are probably aware, it is the extraction part of coffee brewing that is so difficult. But with Instant Specialty it has been performed by quality focussed experienced industry professionals. All that is left is to decide how strong you like it and how you want to drink it. It's great hot or cold and with or without milk.
We’ve been drinking our own Instant Specialty coffee for the last year. It is fantastic and versatile and we can’t wait to get it out to the public and create a new way for you to access specialty coffee.
What is freeze drying?
Freeze drying, technically known as lyophilisation, or cryodesiccation, is a dehydration process. Freeze drying works by freezing the material and then reducing the surrounding pressure to allow the frozen water in the material to sublimate directly from the solid phase to the gas phase.
In the case of brewed coffee, this results in only the dissolved solids being left behind. A typical espresso might be 8% coffee and 92% water for example. A typical filter coffee (like french press, aeropress or pourover) might be 1.35% coffee and 98.65% water. If you remove the water you are left with soluble, freeze dried, Instant Specialty coffee.