What is Pour-Over Coffee? Are the Dangers of Instant Coffee Due to Added Non-Dairy Creamer? Is the Nanjing Auntie's Coffee-Making Method Instant?

The "Nanjing Auntie" who recently went viral needs little introduction. Her self-styled "hand-brewed coffee" has set off lively debate online, precisely because it looks nothing like what most of us mean by hand-brewed coffee.

In an era where specialty coffee shops seem to multiply overnight, hand-brewed coffee means extracting from freshly ground beans using filter paper, a dripper, a gooseneck kettle, and manual pouring. The auntie's "hand-brewed coffee," read literally, just means coffee made by hand. But what actually ignited the discussion wasn't the wording — it was her raw material: instant coffee.

The Coffee Snobbery Chain

Every field has its pecking order, and coffee is no exception. FrontStreet Coffee maintains that different coffees simply serve different drinkers and shouldn't be ranked at all — but the hierarchy exists nonetheless. Instant coffee once sat near the top of China's coffee ladder, second only to Blue Mountain; today it occupies the bottom rung. How did it fall so far?

What Is Instant Coffee?

Coffee's modern history is usually told as three waves, each marking a shift in what the coffee culture of its day cared about most. The first wave was defined by "making coffee instant." Before instant coffee existed, every cup required grinding and brewing on the spot — cumbersome and time-consuming, yet people gladly put in the work because the taste captivated them. The American soldiers who couldn't live without coffee prove the point: they carried the habit into war, seizing every chance to brew during marches, exhausting as it was.

Eventually the U.S. Congress, keen to stop soldiers from burning energy on brewing, began looking for a way to make coffee convenient — to invent an easy route to a decent cup. Britain had actually started researching this as early as the late 18th century, but those efforts, like the later series of American "instant coffees," never caught on for various reasons. (For a deeper dive, see the article "The Development History of Instant Coffee.") It wasn't until 1937 that Nestlé, responding to Brazil's request, invented the spray-drying method: hot air rapidly dries atomized coffee liquid into the powder we know as instant coffee. Production costs were relatively low, so spray-drying quickly became the mainstream process and set the template for everything that followed.

Brewing this kind of coffee couldn't be simpler — add hot water, the powder dissolves, done. That speed and convenience won people over, and the instant coffee industry flourished for a long stretch afterward.

But here's the catch. The beans of that era were low in quality and demanded dark roasting, and the high temperatures of the instant process stripped out whatever flavor remained. The instant coffee of the day simply wasn't good, so producers stirred in generous amounts of sugar and non-dairy creamer to mask the negative flavors — the three-in-one sachet we know today. Heavy long-term consumption of all those additives carried health risks (plain instant black coffee excluded). Before long, authoritative reports on the harms of instant coffee flooded the media, and the public caught on. Right on cue, espresso was on the rise; people abandoned instant and turned to freshly ground shots. Coffee entered its second wave, and the instant era — roughly 1938 to 1960 — was retroactively named the first.

Coffee Culture in China

China's coffee culture arrived late. Just as other countries were moving into the next stage, instant coffee was only then reaching Chinese shores. In an age of poor information and scarce goods, most Chinese knew exactly two kinds of coffee: Jamaican Blue Mountain, which they could never afford, and the instant sold in even the smallest corner store. For people of that time, affordable and tasty instant coffee was a genuine treasure. Today's resistance to instant comes mainly from the fact that, in an information-rich age, people know what goes into it — and they have far more choices. Instant coffee never changed; the lens through which we view it did.

FrontStreet Coffee Recommendation

Blue Mountain holds a special place in this story — once the pinnacle of the snobbery chain, and still the benchmark for balance. FrontStreet Coffee's Jamaica Blue Mountain No.1 comes from the historic Clifton Estate, which has grown coffee since around 1750, at an average elevation of 4,300 feet (1,310.64 meters), with mid-depth roasting that highlights its mellow body and the classic "bitter first, sweet after" character.

Brewing suggestions from FrontStreet Coffee: use a Kono dripper to boost body; a standard 15g dose for one cup, with beans rested 4–7 days from roast date; grind slightly coarser than for light roasts, about the texture of white sugar; water at 87–88°C; a 1:15 ratio. Pour in three stages: 30g bloom for 30 seconds, then up to 120g with a steady vertical stream in slow circles, then up to 225g with a slightly faster flow to keep the bed from clogging and over-extracting.

Flavor profile: exceptionally clean, complex, and gentle — chocolate sweetness, strong body, and a near-perfect balance of sweetness, acidity, and bitterness, with no harsh notes and a lingering fruity finish.