A Cup Of Instant Coffee
Four out of five UK households, the British Coffee Association claims, buy instant coffee to enjoy at home. Although instant contains about a third less caffeine than freshly brewed coffee made from grounds, for many the convenience of pouring boiling water over granules in a cup without any waste to dispose of afterwards overrides any taste or strength considerations.
What makes coffee instant is the removal of all the water from the brewed product either by freeze-drying or spray-drying. Freeze-drying retains more of the coffee flavour but is a complex and expensive process. The concentrate is frozen to -40 Celsius and put into a drying chamber which is heated once a vacuum has been created. As the frozen coffee warms up, the frozen water expands into gas, leaving dry grains of coffee. With spray-drying, a process that takes less than 30 seconds, the concentrate is sprayed from a high tower in a hot-air chamber. The remaining water evaporates, as the droplets fall, and dry coffee crystals descend to the bottom.
The quest to find a convenient alternative to roasting, grinding, and brewing coffee beans began on March 6, 1771, when a grocer and self-proclaimed “coffeeman” from London’s Tooley Street, John Dring, patented his “compound coffee” (no. 984). Roasted Turkish or West Indian coffee, the patent reveals, was ground into a fine flour and then “worked with fresh butter and suet on an iron plate, heated with a gentle fire, till it acquires the consistence of a thick paste”. The paste was moulded into a cake. As well as plain coffee Dring offered a version flavoured with vanilla, cinnamon, and musk.
Dring had a thing about creating cakes from unlikely sources, patenting three years earlier a dried ink cake, (no. 906), bits of which were broken off and dissolved in water to become ink again. His “compound coffee” worked on the same principle, but was not commercially viable, the presence of butter causing the paste to go off quickly.
In 1840 the Scottish company, T & H Smith, developed a “coffee essence”, a highly concentrated liquid prepared by percolation and quick evaporation to about a third or a quarter of its initial volume, to which was added a thick extract of chicory and a syrup of burnt sugar. One or two teaspoons of the molasses-like concentrate when added to boiling water was enough to make a cup of liquid said to taste like coffee-flavoured light molasses.
It was a forerunner of the more famous Camp Coffee, first made in 1876 by Paterson & Sons Ltd of Glasgow for the Gordon Highlanders ahead of their campaign in India. An essence of coffee beans, chicory, and sugar, the dark brown, syrupy liquid, when mixed with water or milk, made a sweetish drink. Camp Coffee can still be bought, its longevity due in part to its use in baking to give cakes a coffee flavouring. As a drink it had a mini revival in 1975 when the price of instant coffee doubled.
The American military’s first attempt to produce a concentrated form of coffee was less successful. “George Hummel’s Premium Essence of Coffee”, a combination of coffee, evaporated milk, and sugar concentrated and dried into a powder, was created at the start of the Civil by H A Tilden & Co. It came in a small, cylindrical tin, whose label boasted that “coffee made by this Essence preserves perfectly the real taste of the best Coffee and will have a more delicate and finer flavour, a finer colour and will be much more wholesome than pure Coffee”.
Fine words, though, do not a palatable cup of coffee make, with the troops who likened it to axle grease refusing to drink it. It was quietly dropped.
