Few technologies are more taken for granted than instant coffee, yet the chemical problem at its heart — removing water from a beverage whose entire value lies in volatile, heat-sensitive compounds — occupied inventors for nearly two centuries before anyone solved it adequately. Works in Progress traces that arc from a butter-and-tallow paste filed with the British patent office in 1771 to cryogenically frozen capsules sold for seven dollars a cup today.
The Core Paradox
The piece opens with a deceptively simple observation that frames everything that follows: coffee's appeal lies in the hundreds of volatile compounds that create its flavor and aroma — exactly the substances most likely to disappear during processing. This is not a solvable problem so much as a managed tension. Every technique in the history of instant coffee represents a different bet on how much flavor destruction is acceptable in exchange for convenience, shelf stability, or cost.
The earliest attempts made that trade badly. John Dring's 1771 patent mixed ground coffee with butter and tallow, producing cakes that went rancid quickly. The mid-nineteenth century brought liquid concentrates — T&H Smith's 1840 "coffee essence" mixed with chicory and burnt sugar syrup — that tasted, the piece notes drily, "more like coffee flavored molasses than proper coffee." The Civil War saw the Union Army procure a concentrate from HA Tilden & Co that soldiers compared, memorably, to axle grease. The problem was structural: boiling water out of brewed coffee destroyed whatever flavor remained. As the piece puts it, the old saying "coffee boiled is coffee spoiled" explains exactly why these early products were syrups rather than powders — boiling away all the water to create dry powder would have destroyed whatever coffee flavor remained.
The New Zealand Breakthrough Nobody Remembers
The first genuine instant coffee powder came not from a major industrial operation but from a spice merchant in Invercargill, New Zealand. David Strang's 1889 "Dry Hot-Air" method — almost certainly adapted from a spice dryer he had already patented — worked by warming the air around coffee rather than the coffee itself. Because evaporating water draws energy from the passing air rather than the liquid, the coffee surface actually cools as it dries, keeping temperatures below boiling. The result was lighter and more shelf-stable than any previous attempt.
But the piece is clear-eyed about its limits. Coffee expert Arjun Haszard is quoted directly: "This process, given what we know about what happens to coffee with heat and air would have undoubtedly resulted in heat damaged, oxidized coffee. Portable, yes, but also most likely horrible." Strang achieved modest commercial success in New Zealand, where his product was advertised as "far superior to any so-called coffee essence." That claim says more about the competition than about the product itself.
War as Market
The piece makes a pattern visible that runs through instant coffee's entire history: military procurement solved the commercialization problem that taste alone never could. Belgian-British inventor George Washington — not the president — launched Red E Coffee in 1909. His method remained a trade secret, and Works in Progress reports that the taste was described as "disagreeable." What Washington had that Strang lacked was industrial scale: a production facility at Brooklyn's Bush Terminal complex. When World War I began, the military procured his entire output, peaking at 37,000 pounds per day.
The human document the piece surfaces here is worth sitting with. A soldier's letter home reads: "I am very happy despite the rats, the rain, the mud, the draughts, the roar of the cannon and the scream of shells. It takes only a minute to light my little oil heater and make some George Washington Coffee . . . Every night I offer up a special petition to the health and well-being of Mr. Washington." Convenience, in conditions of genuine hardship, matters more than flavor. That insight would drive instant coffee's commercial logic for decades.
"Every night I offer up a special petition to the health and well-being of Mr. Washington."
The Nestlé Breakthrough and the Sticky Problem
The piece's most technically rich section covers Max Morgenthaler's development of Nescafé, which grew not from a corporate innovation mandate but from a Brazilian economic catastrophe. The 1929 Wall Street Crash collapsed coffee prices ninety percent within a year, contributing to a revolution that overthrew the Brazilian government. To stabilize prices, Brazil burned 10.3 billion pounds of coffee over multiple years — a scene Works in Progress renders vividly through a 1937 Time article describing "huge grey-green piles of coffee beans smouldering slowly away under great smoke plumes, barges lumbering out to sea to dump coffee overboard, workmen mixing coffee and tar into briquets for building."
A French-Italian bank holding surplus coffee warehouses approached Nestlé to develop a better instant product. Morgenthaler was assigned the project in 1932, funding was cut in 1935 when nothing worked, and he continued from home using factory equipment during off-hours. The problem he had to solve was specific: spray drying — converting liquid to powder by spraying it as a fine mist into heated air — caused coffee to clump into paste rather than powder. Coffee's natural sugars and acids soften and become sticky at relatively low temperatures. Morgenthaler's solution was to mix the coffee with carbohydrates like maltodextrin or glucose before drying. These larger molecules remain solid at higher temperatures, raising the stickiness threshold and allowing the mixture to dry into free-flowing particles.
Nescafé launched in 1938. A year's stock sold out in two months. World War II replicated the dynamic of World War I at even greater scale: by 1942, the entire output of Nestlé's US plant was classified a "commodity vital to the war effort" and dedicated to the military.
The Cold Frontier
Spray drying kept heat exposure brief, but it still imposed heat. Freeze drying — freezing materials and then sublimating the ice directly into vapor under low pressure, bypassing liquid water entirely — offered the possibility of removing water without significant heat at all. The Inca had freeze-dried potatoes in the high Andes in the thirteenth century; industrial interest surged during World War II as a way to preserve blood plasma and penicillin for field use. Maxwell House brought the first freeze-dried instant coffee to market in 1963; Nestlé followed in 1965.
The quality difference is measurable. Works in Progress cites research showing freeze drying maintained seventy-seven percent of volatile compounds compared with fifty-seven percent for spray drying. Texture improves too: freeze drying produces coarse, porous granules that dissolve quickly and completely, while spray-dried powder floats on the surface. The tradeoff is cost and time — freeze drying takes eight to sixteen hours and requires expensive vacuum equipment, producing coffee that typically retails at roughly twice the price of spray-dried. That math explains why spray drying remains dominant.
The Premium Turn
The most recent chapter the piece covers is the emergence of a specialty instant market — a category that would have seemed oxymoronic twenty years ago. The piece traces two distinct threads. The first is technical: advances in aroma recovery that capture volatile compounds before drying, store them separately, and reintroduce them afterward. Works in Progress describes Flavourtech's spinning cone column, originally developed for dealcoholizing wine, which cascades ground coffee and cold water down alternating fixed and rotating cones, creating a millimeter-thick film from which low-temperature steam collects volatile aromatics. Coffee spends twenty-five seconds in the machine. The concentrated aroma extract is preserved and added back after drying.
The second thread is structural. Large-scale instant coffee production historically required multi-million-dollar capital investment — extraction batteries, concentration equipment, drying facilities — that only manufacturers running at massive volume could justify. In 2016, Nate Kaiser founded Swift Cup Coffee in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, pioneering contract processing for specialty roasters: brewing their beans to precise extraction standards, freeze drying in small batches, and packaging under the roaster's brand. This converts fixed costs into variable ones, letting small roasters enter the market without major capital outlay. Verve and Supreme now sell freeze-dried versions of their coffees for around $2.50 per cup — thirty-five times the price of standard instant.
Flash freezing pushes further still. Massachusetts-based Cometeer, founded in 2016, brews coffee at ten times normal strength and then exposes it to cryogenic temperatures using liquid nitrogen. The piece explains that freezing at extreme cold keeps ice crystals small enough that they don't damage the coffee's structure or degrade volatile compounds. The frozen concentrate ships in aluminum capsules, packed in dry ice. Capsules start at around two dollars per cup and reach $7.50 for premium beans.
What the Piece Leaves Underdeveloped
Critics might note that Works in Progress is more comfortable with chemistry than economics. The piece documents the supply-side transformation of instant coffee thoroughly but gives less attention to whether the premium instant market is driven by genuine quality improvements or primarily by marketing to consumers who want the specialty coffee signal with reduced preparation friction. The price premium for freeze-dried specialty instant — sometimes thirty-five times the cost of commodity instant — is not obviously explained by production costs alone.
The piece is also largely silent on the environmental dimension. Instant coffee, by concentrating and drying coffee at scale, can be more transport-efficient than whole beans or ground coffee. Flash freezing's cryogenic infrastructure and dry-ice distribution chain points the other way. A fuller accounting of instant coffee's industrial evolution would weigh these tradeoffs, particularly as the specialty market scales.
There is also a question the piece raises but doesn't pursue: who controls the contract processing infrastructure that enabled the specialty instant market? If a small number of processors serve the entire specialty roaster ecosystem, that concentration point carries supply chain risk and pricing power that independent roasters may not fully appreciate.
Bottom Line
Works in Progress has written a serious piece of industrial history that rewards careful reading — the chemistry is explained accessibly, the archival material is vivid, and the through-line from Dring's rancid butter cakes to Cometeer's liquid nitrogen capsules is genuinely illuminating. The piece's deepest implication, never quite stated directly, is that instant coffee's history is a two-century argument between convenience and quality in which quality has slowly, grudgingly, begun to win.