Coffee to you could be a beverage, maybe with ice, whipped cream and milk, coffee to you could be instant coffee that instantly dissolves in water, or it could be a roasted bean that is ground very carefully and brewed with precision. Find out more about what is coffee in this video by our in-house coffee expert Shubham Chawla. Do subscribe to our youtube channel and follow us on Instagram: @smthingsbrewing and Twitter: Somethingsbrwng. If you have any questions for us, do ask away in the comments section below.

Most commercial coffees are grown on the coffee belt, which lies between the two tropics: The Tropic of Cancer and The Tropic of Capricorn. Traditionally, most of the coffees were consumed outside of this belt, further north, and south. This was because coffee was seen as a rich person’s beverage. Coffee traditionally was grown in the south of India, most of this grown in Karnataka, but now we have these new growing regions like parts of Odisha (Koraput), Araku in Andhra Pradesh, and now even in the North-Eastern parts of the country.

Instant coffee is exactly as the name suggests it's coffee that is prepared instantaneously with very little effort. Traditionally coffee takes about three to four minutes to brew in a manual brewing method or about 30 seconds if you're trying to pull an espresso shot. Instant coffee just needs a spoon and hot water. All you do is take your powder and dissolve it in water.

Now instant coffee is made with two different technologies: Freeze Drying Method Spray Drying Method The beginning of both these methods is actually the same as brewing normal coffee. What you need is actual roasted coffee beans ground super fine and you have a slurry which is your coffee beverage.

This happens on a very large scale in industry. In the spray drying method, the coffee concentrate is taken up to a certain height in a large chamber. This chamber is very hot. What happens in this is coffee concentrate is actually sprayed out in the form of small droplets, and as its nitrate is down from the top to the bottom, evaporates the water and what you get out is a fine super fine powder.

We call spray-dried instant coffee, Where the spray drying method uses heat to convert the liquid coffee to instant coffee. Now, this heat is actually detrimental to the flavors of coffee as coffee is very sensitive to heat. The freeze-drying method is a more advanced way to make instant coffee. It's also more time-consuming and a little more expensive.

What happens here is instead of using heat we use cooler temperatures and a vacuum chamber. What is done is that you have the same liquid concentrate this concentrate site is frozen rapidly frozen by reducing the temperature and once this is a solid form, we use the process of sublimation which is taking the solid form of instant coffee directly into a gas now that's not the instant coffee that is becoming the gas that is the water in the instant coffee.

So, when we have the frozen instant coffee, we are taking the water instead of taking it to a liquid form were taking it from solid to gaseous that's how we remove some of the water from the brewed coffee post this the coffee is the frozen coffee is further taken into a vacuum chamber. Finally, we have a couple of more proprietary methods which change the basis of the manufacturer but ultimately what happens is the liquid is removed and your frozen slab of freeze-dried instant coffee is broken into smaller granules. Which is why it is more granular in nature and not an extreme powder.