After reading about Starbucks making an instant coffee I became curious as to how instant coffee was made so I did some research.

Surprisingly, instant coffee is in fact coffee. The way it works is, coffee is brewed regularly, then it sits out so that all the water can evaporate leaving a highly concetrated coffee powder. Once the coffee powder is obtained there are two choice of what to do next.

To preserve the most flavor the coffee powder can be freeze-dried. This is a highly involved process that freeze the powder to -40 degrees celcius, leaving dry coffee crystals which can then be added to hot water which melt the crystals and diffuse with the water to make coffee.

The other option is called spray-drying. In this process, once the water evaporates from the brewed coffee it is sprayed from a tower in a hot air chamber. The hot air evaporates any remaining water and the coffee crystals fall to the bottom of the chamber.

I was surprised to find that not many additives are added to instant coffee.