If your goal is to have a cup of the best instant coffee in the world, with the best flavors and aromas, the only way to get that is with a process called freeze-drying. It all comes down to taste.  If your goal is to enjoy a cup of coffee that tastes just like fresh brewed, then you need freeze-dried.

How Instant Coffee is Made

When companies make instant coffee, the first step is to make freshly brewed coffee in a concentrated liquid form.  The next step is the tricky step – they have to take the water out. How the water is taken out makes a big difference in taste.  There are two ways to take the water out –one is cheap, one is not so cheap.

Spray Dried

The cheaper way to make instant coffee is by using the spray drying technique.  Instant coffee manufacturers choose spray drying because spray drying allows the company to produce a much greater amount of product in a shorter amount of time. After all, the spray dryer has a bigger capacity than a freeze dryer. This is why it’s cheaper than freeze-drying.

In this process, the coffee concentrate is turned into a spray.  Then the coffee concentrate is sprayed into a stream of very hot air.  This process happens at the top of a tall cylindrical tower.  The concentrate comes in contact with the extremely hot air, and the water evaporates instantly.  As the coffee falls through the cylinder, it becomes a very fine powder.  The instant coffee company will then need to turn this fine powder into granules in order to be able to put it into a jar for sale.

What’s Wrong with Spray Drying

Spray-dried instant coffee isn’t very good tasting because the process uses such high heat.  The high heat gets the job done, but it also can degrade the taste and aroma of the coffee.  Some people find that spray-dried instant coffee has a kind of a burned taste. Boomi Coffee company only uses freezing drying techniques to keep the coffee from developing that unpleasant taste.

What’s Right with Freeze Drying

In this process, the freshly-brewed coffee concentrate is frozen below its triple point.  This is a complicated part of thermodynamics with simple everyday applications.  When the concentrated coffee reaches its triple point, the manufacturer can tweak the temperature or the pressure by just a teeny tiny amount. The water in the frozen coffee will turn directly into gas.

This is how Boomi coffee produces the best-tasting instant coffee. The great thing about this is that the coffee is not subjected to those high temperatures, so the coffee taste and aroma are not damaged in any way.  Of course, this way of producing instant coffee is a more expensive process.

Now you can see that the reason people would choose a more expensive freeze-dried cup of coffee is because that cup of coffee will taste like freshly brewed coffee.