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! :)
Ah reflux! I drink way too much coffee since forever and recently asked my doc about it: he told me that if I had no reflux, then I simply shouldn't worry about it. Some people have reflux with coffee, others don't. I drink more coffee than 99% of the population and I get zero reflux. Since decades.
It's a cool article but in a way many coffee became instant coffee: as my coffee machine is often already warm (wife btw she's also a heavy coffee drinker), it's actually more instant to have my full auto coffee machine ground the beans and make a coffee than it'd take to boil water for an instant coffee. Same for the people doing the (very costly compared to beans) capsule coffee thing: it's ultra quick (and one of the reason capsule coffee like Nespresso conquered so many).
P.S: I'll try your mocha trick!
How much is that?
Is my favorite part of the article lol
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.
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)
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.
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.
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. :)
however in the UK the premium supermarkets have really good instant coffee i.e M&S and Waitrose.
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.
[0] https://improbable.com/2018/10/26/a-look-back-at-george-gobl...
I thought maybe it could use a capacitor or something? I'm not an electrical engineer -- all I know is we have half the voltage here, and I've seen things like USB plates before -- the older type of USB... and USB C can power a laptop.
So I thought, since the English love their goddamn tea so much, they'd probably have a USB-C teakettle if such a thing is possible, and then I wouldn't need an adapter (if an adapter is even possible for higher voltage appliances like that).
Mine takes four minutes. Minutes are short in the morning in America :-(
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].
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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.
A cup of tea is a bit less than 3 cents. The cost of water from the tap isn't enough to be worth calculating (and in a world of shortages, I live in a region where we have too much water). Heating is about 1/4 of the total cost, which is significant.
But that leaves me with a dirty cup that eventually needs to be washed.
So how much does it cost to clean the cup?
Starting with my kitchen faucet that had been doing nothing for hours, I started a clock and turned on the hot water and measured the volume that came out before it became warm-enough-to-wash-some-stuff. It took about 18 seconds and 1.6l to get to right about 110f, which my fingers determined to be "warm enough". The incoming water temperature is 58f right now. (The water heater is a recently-installed resistive unit.)
Raising the temperature of this 1.6l of water cost me almost exactly 1 cent, and that's all waste energy -- that's what it takes to get the process started.
Then I have to wash the cup. I didn't work through that, but I've done it enough that I can estimate that it takes me about 20 seconds total to scrub tea stains from a coffee cup and make it white again if I'm in a hurry about it. No big deal, time-wise.
But because I'm focused on washing the cup more than I am on conserving energy, I usually let the water run while I wash up the cup. That's another 20 seconds of running the hot tap (for 38 seconds total), adding another 1.13 cents (or 2.13 cents total).
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So that's our minimum: 2.13 cents, just to heat the water to wash the cup with 38 seconds of running it. Maybe, some days.
But realistically, it's likely more than that. I've measured incoming water temperature to be as low as 38f here[1]. The water heater itself is set to 140f, and as a practical matter when I wash a single coffee cup I generally use 100% hot water.
In that worst case, it's more like 4.23 cents to wash a cup. (Again, if I'm hurrying. I don't always hurry.)
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So the total cost of a single cup of tea, for me, is somewhere in the realm of between 5 and 7 cents. Heating the water is by far the biggest contribution to that cost.
And merely washing the cup by hand is a significant cost contribution at one end of the scale, and is the largest contribution at the other end.
That's surprising to me. These numbers still don't matter much (how many cups of tea do I drink in a month? or in a year? how often do I actually wash that cup?), but it's surprising enough that I think I'll start using the dishwasher for these things.
The dishwasher is a bit cheaper, and a lot lazier.
[1]: I'm not redoing worst-case for making the tea itself, because the water for tea-making comes from a large countertop water filter that connects to the kitchen faucet. The contents are generally always near room temperature, at the behest of the ambient environment that is controlled by a gas forced air furnace or aircon. I'm not getting that far into the weeds. :)
Ideal brewing temperature depends on a lot of factors but even ultralight roasts don’t require anything near boiling.
I bought one of these for $79 instead and I’ve been perfectly happy with it.
https://www.kmart.com.au/product/digital-hot-water-dispenser...
