The first wave of coffee history: how to make office workers have a drink with you no matter how busy they are?

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If you love coffee, you must have heard of the so-called "coffee tide". In fact, in the process of coffee evolution, there are three different waves of coffee sweeping the world, and the coffee market you see now is intertwined by these three waves of coffee. Today, these three different waves of coffee still have a place in the coffee market.

And this time Goat Coffee will uncover the mystery of the first wave of coffee-the history of soluble coffee.

Instant coffee, Instant coffee. There was a time when it became the common language of early risers around the world, making a cup of delicious, hot three-in-one instant coffee early in the morning for a slow commute. Although this scene has been replaced by street corner cafes and supermarkets in recent years, instant coffee is still one of the common forms of coffee on the market.

The process of instant coffee

You must wonder how instant coffee is made. Why can instant coffee powder melt quickly as soon as it is put into hot water?

The production of instant coffee is divided into four processes:

1. Baking

Like the usual coffee making process, coffee beans need to be roasted. The roasting of instant coffee is not much different from that of ordinary coffee beans, but under the consideration of commercial cost, for a large number of roasting, the model is larger than the common bean roaster, and can handle more coffee beans at one time.

two。 Grinding

This step is the same as the production of general coffee powder, which is to grind the roasted coffee beans into a bean grinder. Generally speaking, the finer the grinding at this stage, the more conducive to the next stage of "extraction" operation.

3. Extraction

This stage is the biggest difference between instant coffee and ordinary coffee, that is, the difference in the form of extraction. Coffee beans contain a certain amount of soluble solid substance, which dissolves in water when encountered with hot water, which is the instant coffee powder that you and I see when we brew instant coffee.

To put it simply, the extraction of instant coffee is the use of extremely high temperature hot water to extract the aromatic substances and soluble solid substances from the coffee powder through the ground coffee powder to form coffee liquid.

However, at the end of the extraction, these soluble solids have been dissolved in hot water to form coffee liquid. Therefore, we have to go through the last step, "concentration", to extract the soluble solid matter again.

4. Condense

At present, there are two main forms of concentration. the first is jet drying, which uses a high-pressure spray column to spray coffee liquid into a high-temperature gas of 220 degrees Celsius, evaporating water instantly, leaving instant coffee powder.

The other is freeze-drying, in which the coffee liquid is frozen at minus 40 degrees Celsius and heated in a vacuum, so that the water is directly sublimated into a gas to concentrate instant coffee powder. The coffee powder produced by this method is of high quality, but the cost is also high.

After the above four steps, instant coffee powder that can be dissolved in hot water can be made. If cream is added to instant coffee powder, it is two-in-one instant coffee, and if powdered sugar and cream are added to coffee powder at the same time, it is three-in-one coffee powder.

The development history of instant coffee

Instant coffee was invented by New Zealander David Strang as early as 1889 and patented in 1890. Unfortunately, the instant coffee invented by David Strang has not been commercialized, so it is gradually buried in the torrent of coffee history.

It was not until 1901 that instant coffee was seen again. Kato Satori, a Japanese scientist working in Chicago, USA, improved David Strang's instant coffee to dissolve coffee powder more quickly, and founded Kato Coffee Company Kato Coffee Company, which was the first attempt to commercialize instant coffee and had set up a stall to sell it at an expo in New York.

However, perhaps it was because the public at that time was not very receptive to this novel way of making and taste of coffee, so Kato's instant coffee was not popular with consumers.

The real commercial success of instant coffee was reached by George Washington George Washington, who had the same name as the founding president of the United States. George Washington emigrated from Belgium to New York in 1887. He saw the instant coffee invented by Kato at the New York Fair in 1901. At that time, he was very interested in instant coffee, but did not devote himself to it.

It was not until 1909 that George Washington, who lived in the central United States, came up with the idea of selling instant coffee. He began to sell his own coffee powder, and in 1910 he founded the Washington Coffee Company Washington Coffee Company, which began mechanized mass production of canned instant coffee powder. Washington instant coffee has achieved initial success in the market because of good marketing and advertising.

Advertising for the Washington Coffee Company

The instant coffee business in Washington reached its peak with the advent of World War I. After the US military entered the war in 1917, the Washington Coffee Company became a munitions supplier to the US military, that is, soluble coffee became an important material to support the allies in trench warfare, which laid the foundation for the wider popularity of instant coffee after the war. it also started the first wave of coffee dominated by instant coffee.

Nestle instant coffee

Nestle instant coffee, which is famous all over the world, can be said to be one of the most important promoters of the first wave of coffee. Nestl é officially launched Nestle instant coffee in 1938 and became popular all over the United States in the 1940s and 1950s. With the pace of globalization, Nestl é instant coffee appeared in supermarkets and stores around the world.

And this is the peak of the first wave of coffee, for such a long time, that is, soluble coffee occupied all parts of the world, became the main form of coffee, and occupied all coffee pathways. Until the rise of the second and third waves of coffee, that is, melted coffee came under constant attack and was losing ground in sales. However, today, instant coffee is still common in all major channels, but the emergence of earbags seems to have dealt a fatal blow to instant coffee, that is, soluble coffee is no longer what it used to be.

The first wave of coffee also seems to be the afterglow of the past.