Can you imagine this? More than a hundred years ago, people were seriously studying one very specific problem: how to get coffee into the hands of soldiers on the front line, preferably while it was still hot. Some ideas were so extreme that people even imagined stuffing coffee powder into artillery shells and firing it straight onto the battlefield.
The first time I came across that claim, I just froze for a second. In my mind, instant coffee had never been something worth taking very seriously. It felt more like an emergency supply, the thing at the very bottom of the coffee hierarchy: the least dignified, least refined, most "it'll do" version of coffee.
Look at the coffee world now: pour-over, single origin, light roast, medium roast, natural process, washed process, plus all those cafe owners, flavor wheels, and cupping vocabulary. The whole thing can feel almost like wine tasting. Even Starbucks and Luckin start to seem a little insufficiently sophisticated in that context.
And instant coffee? Does anyone still drink it now? 🤔 (Other than that grandmother who was brewing Nescafe like pour-over coffee.)
But when I actually started looking into its history, I realized that this powder, the thing that seems most ordinary, cheapest, and least story-worthy, hides an entire history of modern industry that is both hardcore and absurd. It has to do with war, the Great Depression, global trade, food engineering, and eventually even the efficiency-driven way we live today.
The Bottom of the Coffee Hierarchy, and My Deadline Survival Drug
If I had to say which kind of coffee most resembles my own temperament, at this point I think I can only be instant coffee. Why? Let's keep going.
I am not really a heavy coffee drinker at all. I may not even drink five cups in a year. Partly because I do not understand all the flavor appreciation, and partly because I am a little sensitive to caffeine. After drinking it, my heart always starts pounding. So over the years, my biggest overlap with instant coffee has basically been those very, very rare moments when I am rushing a deadline and need temporary life support. Compared with being afraid of falling asleep, I am usually much more afraid of not being able to sleep.
My earliest memory of instant coffee is the Nestle glass jar we had at home when I was little. Back then it was not sold in the stick packs you see everywhere now. It came separately: one jar of pure coffee powder, and one jar of white coffee creamer. At that age I did not even like drinking coffee. What I liked most was secretly eating the creamer. I thought it tasted like milk tablets: fragrant, sweet, and honestly pretty good.
That is also why I used to think there was not much to say about instant coffee. Wasn't it just a compromise invented for convenience after sacrificing flavor?
The "Dark Cuisine" Born From War
Until a while ago, when I watched a documentary about World War I and World War II. There was a brief segment about how, at the time, in order to let soldiers on the front line drink a hot cup of coffee as quickly as possible and steady morale - soldiers really had miserable conditions then, and one hot cup of coffee could calm people down - the military and merchants seriously thought about how to make coffee lighter, faster, easier to transport, and easier to brew.
That was when I suddenly realized that instant coffee may not have started out as the "cheap substitute" we imagine today. It was first of all a big problem: a problem of efficiency, logistics, and even winning or losing wars. It was a problem of how modern industry compresses time, compresses space, compresses flavor, and finally compresses a cup of coffee into a spoonful of powder.
Human beings wrestled with this problem for more than a century.
Instant coffee is hard to make not because "drying coffee" sounds especially profound, but because the most valuable part of coffee is exactly the part that is hardest to keep. Coffee's soul comes from hundreds of extremely volatile aromatic compounds. If you want instant coffee, you have to remove the water first. But the moment dehydration begins, the aroma starts running away. Of course you can boil coffee down into a concentrate, but the harder you boil it, the faster the flavor dies.
In other words, coffee is a very awkward thing. So much of its pleasure comes from smell. That creates a paradox: the more convenient you try to make it, the more easily it becomes unpleasant. So early humans really did many things that sound today like "dark cuisine":
- Butter coffee cakes: The earliest instant-like coffee was made by a man named John Dring. His method was extremely direct: mix ground coffee with butter and beef tallow, heat it into a thick paste, then shape it into little cakes. When you wanted to drink it, you tossed one into hot water. The added fat may have been meant to carry fat-soluble compounds or prevent oxidation. But the result was that before the coffee could spoil, the fat went rancid first. Before this thing had time to change the world, it went sour on its own.
- Molasses coffee essence: In the 1840s, a Scottish company created something called "coffee essence." They first concentrated coffee to one quarter of its original volume, then mixed in chicory extract and caramel syrup until it became a thick, molasses-like substance. It was convenient, yes, but the taste was closer to a small cup of coffee-flavored sweet syrup, something like Nanyang-style coffee.
- Axle grease: During the American Civil War, the Union Army mixed concentrated coffee with sweetened condensed milk, hoping to reduce transport weight and provide calories quickly. In theory it was perfect. Soldiers were very much not convinced, and even described its texture as "axle grease." Add the dust of the battlefield, and each mouthful probably came with sand.
All the attempts of that era shared the same misunderstanding: they were all boiling. Once you boil, flavor breaks down. Once you concentrate, bitterness and astringency come out. If you keep going and boil off the water entirely, you are not far from a bittering agent.
World War I and the Great Depression: Instant Coffee's Industrial Turning Point
Of course people knew early instant coffee did not taste good. But war does not care first about whether something tastes good. It first cares whether you can let a hundred thousand people drink something hot and caffeinated in the shortest possible time.
By World War I, instant coffee finally began to shine. The businessman George Washington launched the first commercial instant coffee product. It still did not taste great, but the convenience it offered was enough to make soldiers deeply grateful.
A soldier once wrote in a letter, roughly saying that even with rats, mud, rain, drafts, shellfire, and shrieking sounds around him, if he could light a little oil stove and brew a cup of George Washington coffee, one minute was enough for him to feel happy again. He even said he prayed every night for Mr. Washington's health and safety.
That may sound exaggerated, but if you think about it carefully, it is moving. The meaning of that cup of coffee was that, amid chaos and fear, it gave someone a little sense of order, a little sense of daily life, a little feeling that "I am still a person."
But the thing that truly pushed instant coffee to industrial scale was not war. It was an economic crisis.
In Brazil in the 1930s, there was a scene so absurd it felt like black comedy. Because of the Great Depression, the international market had a severe coffee surplus. To stabilize prices, the Brazilian government burned 10.3 billion pounds of coffee beans over several years, roughly equivalent to three years of global production. Ships loaded with coffee dumped beans directly into the sea. Inland trains burned coffee beans in their boilers instead of coal.
The Brazilian government was desperate. What they needed was no longer "how to make a good cup of coffee," but "how to turn all these surplus beans into a new product the whole world can consume." So they knocked on the door of an old Swiss food company: Nestle.
At this point, a young researcher named Max Morgenthaler took over this project, one that could easily have gone nowhere. His idea was simple: if milk can become milk powder, why can't coffee?
He tried spray drying, but ran into a dead end. The natural sugars and acids in coffee softened and became sticky under heat. Before they could turn into powder, they clumped into a paste. After a long stretch of failures, the company stopped the project. But Morgenthaler did not give up. He kept tinkering at home, and later the company allowed him to return to the lab and continue.
And he actually pulled it off. He added roughly the same amount of high-molecular-weight carbohydrates, such as maltodextrin, to the coffee liquid, allowing the mixture to remain stable under high heat and pass successfully through spray drying. With that, the industrialization problem was finally solved.
Nestle finally had an instant coffee that could truly be mass-produced, stored, transported, and sold around the world. It became the brand that would later turn into an almost era-defining symbol: Nescafe.
From this stage onward, instant coffee was no longer just an emergency solution for the battlefield. It was packaged as a modern lifestyle: faster, lighter, more respectable, more efficient. It sold extremely well, and during World War II, through enormous demand from the U.S. military and later the postwar CARE relief packages, it fully entered the global market.
A Century-Long Tug-of-War: Dehydration Versus Aroma
By this point, instant coffee had achieved commercial success, but it had not solved the most fundamental problem: it tasted bad. As long as heat was involved, aroma would be lost. For the next few decades, almost every upgrade to instant coffee was really trying to patch the same hole: aroma.
- Hot-air spray drying: David Strang in 1889 and later Satori Kato laid the groundwork. It was convenient and shelf-stable, but heat caused oxidation and damaged flavor.
- Vacuum freeze drying: If hot air blows the aroma away, then do not use heat. First freeze concentrated coffee liquid into blocks of ice, break them apart, then put them in a vacuum environment and apply gentle heat so the ice sublimates directly into gas. Compared with the 57% of flavor retained by hot-air methods, freeze drying can preserve 77%. But it brings new problems: expensive equipment, long processing times, high energy consumption, and soaring costs.
- Aroma recovery: In pursuit of better taste, factories use powerful centrifuges to first extract and preserve the most easily lost part of coffee's "soul." Once the dry powder is finished, they add the aroma back in.
- Microgrinding: To solve instant coffee's thin, watery mouthfeel, Starbucks launched VIA, mixing micron-level powder made from roasted coffee beans into instant coffee in an attempt to get infinitely close to freshly ground coffee.
- Liquid-nitrogen concentration, or no dehydration at all: The American company Cometeer simply broke the assumption. If dehydration destroys flavor, then do not dehydrate. They brew coffee to ten times its usual concentration, then instantly freeze it with liquid nitrogen at nearly minus 200 degrees Celsius and seal it in capsules. The price is $7.50 a cup, more than fifty yuan, and drinking it requires the cooperation of an entire modern cold-chain logistics system.
Epilogue: A Cup as a Metaphor for Modern Industry
For more than a hundred years, instant coffee has kept evolving. Human beings have never truly accepted the idea that "instant coffee is supposed to taste bad."
At the same time, another reality has never changed: the things that can fill supermarket shelves, enter everyday life, sit in office drawers and night-shift workstations, are often not the best things. They are the cheapest, most stable, and most easily reproduced at scale.
This may be what truly fascinates me about instant coffee. It has accompanied soldiers shivering in trenches, the global commodity market after the Great Depression, countless workers on rush-hour subway trains, and students like me rushing deadlines deep into the night.
Its entire history is really a history of how human beings keep trading flavor for efficiency, little by little. We want things lighter, faster, cheaper, more stable, more convenient. So we accept small losses, repeated compromises, and the transformation of things that were once delicate, fragile, and unsuited to industrialization into something compressed, dehydrated, standardized, and finally turned into a powder that dissolves instantly and can be reproduced anytime.
So if you ask me what instant coffee really is, I now think it is not a synonym for bad coffee, nor a joke in the coffee world. It is more like modern industry's repeated compromise with traditional flavor. And to some extent, many of our lives have been shaped in exactly the same way.
Of course we know that slowly grinding beans, slowly pouring water, and waiting for a cup of pour-over to finish dripping will be more fragrant, more subtle, more layered. But more often, we still tear open a little packet of instant coffee, pour it into a cup, add hot water, pick it up, and keep moving forward.
The next time you see that small spoonful of instant coffee, maybe you can think about it for one extra second: what you are drinking is not only coffee.
It is a way an era handles time, desire, and compromise
References
- TIME 1937: “Business: 3 a Cup?” Corresponds to the absurd historical background during the Great Depression when the Brazilian government destroyed and dumped massive amounts of surplus coffee beans to save the economy from collapse.
- Nestlé Official Nescafé History Page Corresponds to Nestlé accepting the Brazilian government's commission, researcher Max Morgenthaler overcoming the technical challenges of spray drying, and the product's massive popularization during World War II.
- Satori Kato 1903 Patent US735777A Corresponds to the concentrated dehydrated coffee powder patent by early instant coffee pioneer Satori Kato, representing humanity's early attempts to preserve flavor.
- Starbucks VIA / Microground Product Description Corresponds to Starbucks' microgrinding technology, which directly blends micron-level freshly ground coffee bean powder into instant coffee to solve the issue of a thin mouthfeel.
- Cometeer Official Description Corresponds to the disruptive technology adopted by the modern American specialty coffee brand—completely abandoning dehydration and directly flash-freezing highly concentrated coffee liquid with liquid nitrogen, representing the latest and most expensive compromise in the instant coffee industry.