Specialty instant coffee is here! How does it work?

A few days ago, I pushed an article about instant coffee , and my friends in the background wanted to know if there was any boutique coffee that could rival hand-brewed coffee. I searched carefully, and I really found it.

Photography: Courtesy of St ALi

It tastes like caffeinated grit with a punch of gusto, but Australian roasting company St ALi and US-based Voilà have come up with a new instant product that they say promises the flavour of pour-over coffee by simply adding water.

Traditional instant coffee tastes like it was scraped from the oven, due to its low quality and price in the first place. Some distributors even add additives to enhance or mimic the flavor of the coffee. Then there’s the fuzziness around sourcing practices and ethics (two controversial topics in contemporary coffee discourse) when brands source large quantities of coffee beans at low prices.

Voilà is different. This instant coffee producer uses 100% traceable specialty coffee beans, which is coffee with a score of more than 85 points in the SCAA rating system. The company uses rapid cold drying technology, which is also one of the common methods for making instant coffee.

Founder Kent Sheridan said: "We pour the extracted coffee onto an ultra-low temperature metal plate and then use vacuum extraction to gradually dry out the moisture, leaving only crystals of soluble coffee substances on the metal plate." He thought he was on to something and kept the all-important brewing recipe secret.

Voilà is not a coffee bean roasting company. Instead, it works with many specialty coffee roasters in the United States and around the world. For example, they recently worked with St Ali and its founder Salvatore Malatesta from Melbourne to create Finca La Laja instant coffee produced from the James Fernandez plantation in El Tambo, Colombia, which covers only 5 hectares. This coffee has a rich aroma of plum, brown sugar and flowers.

It is reported that the product is priced at US$16 per 25g (5g per bag), which is obviously much more expensive than ordinary instant coffee. But even so, the product was sold out in the first three days of sale.

This product is also St Ali’s first specialty instant coffee. “We are willing to try everything new,” said Malatesta. “It was a no-brainer to partner with Voilà.”

"It follows the movement of molecules," he said. "Many chefs around the world have been experimenting with dehydration many years ago." Dehydration can make ingredients more flavorful and extend their shelf life.

Broadsheet decided to put it to the test. We compared the taste of Voilà specialty instant coffee with other common instant coffee brands. The results are very clear. The taste of the coffee is close to hand-poured coffee, but it also has some flaws.

“What we’re missing, and what we can’t replicate, is the aroma,” Malatesta said.

At the same time, the taste of the coffee is more like instant coffee, lacking the mellowness of espresso or hand-brewed coffee. It seems that Voilà still has a long way to go if it wants to replicate the delicious taste of hand-brewed coffee.

But in terms of taste and appearance alone, this instant coffee definitely beats all other similar products.

“Regular instant coffee packaging doesn’t look appealing,” said Malatesta. “We tried to come up with a new packaging design to differentiate it from regular instant coffee products.”