How instant coffee can be used in an office environment

Coffee is as commonplace in the office as computers. More and more companies are offering it to their employees as a perk. It helps keep people awake and focused. It also gives people a chance to get up and stretch their legs as they walk to the kitchen. Water cooler chats have merged to coffee making chats, and that chance to socialise while taking a mental break from work is another benefit of having coffee in the building.

An easy way to offer coffee without the space, money and all the other bits and pieces a coffee machine needs, is with instant coffee. The shelf life of instant coffee is considerably longer than freshly roasted beans. While coffee beans generally start to lose flavour after a couple weeks, instant coffee has a shelf life of a couple years. You can buy wholesale instant coffee in bulk to ensure you always have enough for your employees without worrying about the best buy date.

Types of instant coffee

Instant coffee is basically a dehydrated cup of coffee, not ground coffee beans in their original form. There are two main ways to turn the brewed coffee into instant coffee: freeze drying and spray drying. Freeze drying is removing the water by sublimation, which is the process of turning a solid water directly into a vapour water. The coffee is first cooked down to an extract, so it becomes a thick sludge and then is frozen. From there, it’s broken up into tiny pieces before it goes into the sublimation process where it’s heated up in a drying vacuum and the ice vaporises. What’s left behind are the coffee granules that are then packaged as instant coffee. Spray drying is a simpler process but does lose more flavour than freeze-drying. To make this kind of instant coffee, you spray the liquid coffee concentrate as a fine mist into very hot, dry air. The water evaporates and what hits the ground are the coffee flakes.