Differences Between Instant Coffee and Regular Black Coffee: Is Instant Coffee Healthy?

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Understanding the Differences Between Instant Coffee and Regular Black Coffee

Many newcomers want to get into coffee but cannot tell the different types apart, or explain how they differ. The most basic options are instant coffee, which costs only a few cents a sachet — cheap and practical, but widely said to be unhealthy — and regular black coffee, which smells wonderful but takes a brewing process beginners find hard to master. Without tasting them side by side, it is hard to know which to choose. Today FrontStreet Coffee will walk through the differences between instant coffee — the so-called "coffee essence" — and regular black coffee, and settle whether instant coffee really is bad for you.

In practice it is mostly night owls, people working overtime and office professionals who drink instant coffee, and in the eyes of almost every barista it is looked down on. In a barista's world, instant coffee and coffee are two entirely different things. So what actually separates instant coffee from traditional regular black coffee?

Differences in Preparation Methods

Instant Coffee: Instant coffee is produced in industrial batches, and the screening of the beans is not especially precise, so some impurities are inevitable. After the beans are roasted uniformly on a large scale, they go through freeze-drying or high-pressure spray drying and are turned into small soluble particles. To keep the process stable, various stabilizers, flavourings, preservatives and food disinfectants are added along the way.

Regular Black Coffee: Regular black coffee is far less complex on the industrial side. After farmers harvest the cherries they process them by washing or sun-drying, remove the skin to produce green beans, and pack and sell them. They are roasted once they reach the customer, and that roasting is generally done with much more care and precision.

Differences in Composition

Instant Coffee: Instant black coffee contains a small amount of additives alongside the coffee extract, to maintain stability or boost flavour. Two-in-one and three-in-one products contain considerably more, including non-dairy creamer (coffee whitener), emulsifiers, antagonists, glucose syrup and flavourings.

Regular Black Coffee: Regular black coffee is nothing but what is extracted from the beans themselves. Besides sugars, fats and proteins, it contains trace elements such as caffeine, tannic acid and alkaloids.

Differences in Flavor

Instant Coffee: Much of the aroma is lost during manufacturing, which is why additives are used to build fragrance back up. Instant coffee also relies mainly on low-cost, somewhat lower-grade Robusta beans, so the flavour is dominated by industrial flavourings.

Regular Black Coffee: Because growing regions differ, regular black coffees carry different natural flavours — florals or fruit, or a range of nut and chocolate notes. The aftertaste lingers.

Different Brewing Methods

Instant Coffee: Hot water, stir, drink — the powder dissolves completely. Generally 85 degrees Celsius is the optimal water temperature. Good-quality instant coffee leaves no residue once dissolved.

Regular Black Coffee: Grounds can be extracted by different methods to give the flavours you want — pour-over or drip, for instance.

Respective Advantages

Instant Coffee: The advantage of instant coffee probably comes down to convenience and nothing more.

Regular Black Coffee: A more natural drink, with no additives, and naturally healthier.

Respective Disadvantages

Instant Coffee: Many of the food additives in instant coffee are said to be carcinogenic. The production of non-dairy creamer (coffee whitener) involves unsaturated fatty acids, which are considered very harmful to cardiovascular and cerebrovascular health, and long-term consumption is also said to be bad for the liver. On top of that, however good an instant coffee's flavour may be, it struggles to match a pour-over regular black coffee.

Regular Black Coffee: Preparation is relatively complex, and maintaining, cleaning and caring for the equipment is a chore. Storing beans so they stay fresh also takes some attention. It is, in a word, troublesome.

Conclusion

In short, if health matters to you, if you want a better-tasting experience, and if you would like to add a little sophistication to an otherwise plain daily routine, FrontStreet Coffee sincerely suggests that — conditions permitting — you bravely try freshly ground coffee. Pushing open the door to that new world is not difficult at all.

FrontStreet Coffee Recommendation

A medium roast is the easiest place to start, because during roasting three things decide the final flavour and all three have to be kept in balance: acidity, sweetness and bitterness. The darker the roast, the more bitter and the heavier the body; the lighter the roast, the more acidic and the lighter the body. For anyone chasing a balanced cup, medium-roasted beans are the natural choice.

If you dislike both acidity and bitterness, FrontStreet Brazil Queen's Estate is the one to buy. It comes from Brazil, the world's largest coffee-producing country, and is the distinctive local Yellow Bourbon variety — clean and sweet, and after a medium roast it shows cream, peanut, chocolate, toasted bread and sugarcane aromas and sweetness. It brews as pour-over and works equally well in a moka pot or on an espresso machine.

For something sweeter, FrontStreet Strawberry Candy is the first pick, a blend built on fruit flavour. What makes it unusual is that it combines two well-known Central and South American origins: a honey-processed Costa Rican coffee on one side and a washed Panamanian Gesha on the other. To draw out the best of both, FrontStreet roasts it medium, so it shows orange-blossom honey sweetness alongside a round, sweet body. It suits cold brew, pour-over and espresso, and it is refreshing from the first sip.

FrontStreet 2013 Natural Typica is the Chinese specialty representative, carrying the orthodox Yunnan small-seed profile. To bring back its balanced, gentle character we roast it medium, which gives soft nut, brown sugar, black tea and dried apricot notes. It works for pour-over, cold brew and filter machines, and the value is excellent. And for the classic balanced cup, FrontStreet Jamaica Blue Mountain No.1 is roasted medium, because that is what fuses its distinctive acidity, bitterness, sweetness and body into one powerful, elegant whole. From the first sip you get chocolate, roasted nut, cream and caramel — the roast-driven flavours that other coffees find hard to match.