[gib444]

> 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)

[Jtsummers]

> 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.

[gib444]

Doh, of course! I do consider instant about 10x less enjoyable though so I do I think the comparison holds on one level

[vient]

> 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.

[Error9632]

The 7-10 times seems quite off. It’s pretty close to 5 times assuming common extraction yields about 20%. So instead of brewing 16g of coffee you could dissolve 3.2g of instant.

[maxbond]

For what it's worth I just checked my store brand instant, and the serving suggestion is 1.9 grams.

[Error9632]

All depends on the concentration you are trying to achieve. If you brew 16g of coffee, you'd usually end up with around 260g of finished brew.

[ssl-3]

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. :)