The same craft roasters who changed how we brew at home are now producing instant coffees that, at their best, have some of the distinctive characteristics and flavors you find in a well-made pour over. Looking for something nutty and chocolatey that’s good with milk? Or a bright and zingy Kenyan single origin you want to sip and savor? Just add water and stir.
Craft instant can be traced back to 2016, when two competing small-scale producers entered a market traditionally dominated by industry giants such as Folgers, Nescafé, and Starbucks. San Francisco’s Sudden Coffee operated like a tech company with some serious coffee pedigree. They grabbed headlines, formed high-profile partnerships, and folded in 2020. At the same time, Swift Cup Coffee in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, started collaborating with some small-batch roasters that would be familiar to those who follow coffee. Swift now works with 150 roasters across the country and is responsible for many of the coffees listed here.
Here’s how it works: Roasters send beans to Swift, and Swift sends them back instant coffee. “We brew a high-extract concentrate that preserves as much nuance and flavor as we can,” says Nate Kaiser, Swift’s founder and SEO. “It’s a novel and proprietary method.” The high-extract coffee, which is more a sludge than a liquid, is cooled to a sub-zero temperature. “Once it’s frozen, it goes into a chamber and we remove all of the air so that it’s under a vacuum,” Kaiser says. “It lowers the boiling point so essentially we can ‘boil’ off the water while it’s still in that frozen state.”
What remains is instant coffee, which is called “soluble coffee” in the trade. It’s similar to the process that industry giants use, but at a much smaller scale — and with much more care given to the beans. Some of the 150 roasters that work with Swift might just produce one kind of instant coffee, usually a blend. Others have multiple coffees, some of which are made with high-end single beans, and they trust Swift to do right by those ingredients.
Swift also produces their own instant coffees, and they’re exceptional. Right now, Swift’s selections include four single origins from East Africa, another four from South America including a Gesha from El Salvador, a medium roast blend, a dark roast blend, and a decaf. That’s 11 different kinds of instant coffee for those of you keeping count at home.
Why do I want instant coffee?
There are advantages to instant, starting with convenience. Instant is perfect for camping or when you’re traveling. The coffee you get on a plane might be revolting but the hot water is perfectly fine, and perfectly suitable for instant. Those of us who still work in offices can tuck away a few packets for when the swill in the urn is too much. Instant dissolves quickest in hot water but cold water works too, which makes it an easy option for iced coffee.
But can instant coffee be good?
Yes. The best instant coffees are vastly superior to the jarred instant you happily threw back while in college — or endured while visiting your grandparents. If you’re new to this generation of instant coffee, you’re in for a treat.
All that said, remember that dissolving a packet of instant coffee isn’t the same as brewing coffee from freshly ground whole beans. Some of the aroma is lost, as are the more nuanced flavors. On top of that, craft instant ain’t cheap. A six-pack will run you around $15 or more, which works out to at least $2.50 per cup. That’s the cost of convenience.
How did we pick?
We started with more than 50 coffees, which we sorted into blends, single origins, and decaf. We then prepared them according to the instructions on the packaging and tasted them by pouring the coffee into ceramic “cupping” bowls, which is standard in the industry. Each one was labeled by a number to eliminate bias. We didn’t know who we were tasting, which means we could focus solely on what we tasted.
Each coffee was assessed using a modified version of the Specialty Coffee Association of American Cupping Form, assigning points for flavor, aftertaste, acidity, body, balance, clean cup (which means there are no detectable flavor defects), sweetness, and overall. The form is designed for grading fresh-ground coffee, not instant, so categories like aroma (the powder doesn’t smell like much of anything) and uniformity (all instants from a batch are the same) don’t apply.
The advantage of using the SCAA form is that it points you to specific characteristics of each coffee, and makes you put a number to what you taste. It’s one thing to vibe on a coffee, it’s another to examine the differences between flavor and aftertaste, body and balance. You pay closer attention to what you taste when forced to quantify sweetness, acidity, and clean cup.
You also taste for “defect,” to use an industry term. That could be funkiness from insect or fungal damage, or the paper bag taste of poorly stored beans. There’s a long tradition of using a dark roast to try to mask the flaws of damaged or moldy coffee, then turning that into instant. Not to throw shade, but some other reviews out there give high ratings to instant coffees that, in my opinion, obviously suffer from defect.
The leading coffees from each category then advanced to a final round. Those are the results you see here. In other words, not all coffees that were on the table made the cut. That includes instants from Alpine Start, Bustelo, First Ascent, Folgers, Starbucks, and Taster’s Choice.
At the end of the day, making a coffee recommendation is a little like telling you what brand of jeans to buy: You can talk about quality, craft, and cut as much as you like, but in the end, you want a pair that fits you. When it comes to instant coffee, you should find one that suits your palate. If there are roasters on this list that you know and like, you’re in luck. You will probably enjoy their coffee. If the names are unfamiliar then you might need to try a few until you find the right one for you.
The very best (if somewhat impractical) instant coffee
Before we talk about Commeteer, which is exceptional and produces what is arguably the best instant coffee on the planet, we should acknowledge its flaws.
It’s expensive, for one. One serving costs between $2 and almost $4, and the minimum order is four boxes with eight servings each. It’s bulky, for another. Each serving is packaged in a capsule that’s slightly larger than a Nespresso pod. And it requires some care on your part. The coffees are shipped with dry ice and need to be stored in the freezer. If you’re looking for an instant coffee you can forget in an overnight bag then drink when you find it next year, this isn’t for you.
But if what you want is an instant coffee that objectively tastes better than the fresh-brewed coffee you can make at home, then you should consider Commeteer.
The basics of Commeteer and powdered instant coffee aren’t so different. Both are brewed as a high-extract concentrate that’s something like a coffee sludge. But rather than freeze-drying the coffee, Commeteer flash-freezes the concentrate with liquid nitrogen then packages the ice puck in a capsule that’s flushed with nitrogen to prevent oxidizing. In other words, the coffee is never dehydrated. Instead, it’s frozen like Han Solo in The Empire Strikes Back, ready to be revived at your whim.
And when you do decide to dissolve the puck, you will have all of the nuanced flavors and delicate aromatics of an immaculately prepared pour over from a good coffee shop. Jasmine, bergamot, clove, blueberry: What you taste in a Commeteer coffee can be kaleidoscopic.
