Soluble coffee is made exactly the same way as roasted and ground coffee: beans are blended, roasted, and ground. With NESCAFÉ soluble coffee, however, the beans are also percolated.
After percolation, the brewed coffee is then either spray or freeze dried to remove water.
Spray drying involves passing the ‘brewed’ coffee through a spray nozzle into a continuous stream of hot air to ‘atomise’ the liquid into fine particles. These particles are then wet and dried again to form the ‘agglomerated’ or ‘clustered’ granules found in jars of soluble coffee such as NESCAFÉ BLEND 43.
With freeze drying, brewed coffee is snap frozen at minus 40oC, then ground into the required particle size. These grains are then heated at a low temperature in special vacuum chambers so the ice crystals evaporate, leaving freeze dried coffee granules ready to go into the jar. Using low heat results in a superior coffee – like NESCAFÉ Gold.
Hold the caffeine
There are many techniques used when decaffeinating coffee, all of which remove at least 97% of the caffeine.
NESCAFÉ DECAF is made by soaking green beans in water, thereby extracting any caffeine. The beans are then separated from the water. The water, containing caffeine and some coffee flavour, is then passed over an activated charcoal bed to filter out the caffeine. The now decaffeinated water is then concentrated and added back to the pre-dried decaffeinated beans, thereby giving back any previously removed coffee flavour!
