The History of Freeze-Dried Coffee

Freeze-dried coffee is one of the most important developments in the history of instant coffee. It allows coffee to be prepared quickly while preserving much of the aroma and flavor of freshly brewed coffee. Although modern freeze-drying emerged in the twentieth century, the search for convenient, soluble coffee began much earlier. In 1771, a British patent described “coffee compounds,” an early attempt to create coffee that could be dissolved in water. Over the following centuries, inventors and food scientists continued searching for ways to make instant coffee taste more like the freshly brewed drink.

The scientific foundations of freeze-drying, or lyophilization, developed during the early twentieth century. The process involves freezing a liquid product and then placing it under a vacuum. Instead of melting, the frozen water changes directly from ice into vapor, leaving behind a dry product. This gentle process can preserve many of the volatile compounds responsible for flavor and aroma.

Freeze-drying became particularly important during the Second World War. Researchers developed improved techniques for preserving temperature-sensitive medical products, including blood plasma, penicillin, and other medicines. The technology allowed these materials to be stored and transported more safely, sometimes without conventional refrigeration. Chemist Earl Flosdorf, working with the Armour Research Foundation, was among the important pioneers who helped advance commercial freeze-drying equipment and techniques during the 1940s and 1950s.

After the war, researchers began adapting the technology for food products. The National Research Corporation, which had contributed to wartime preservation technology, applied related techniques to products such as orange juice. Freeze-drying gradually became attractive for coffee because it could produce a lighter, more aromatic instant product than conventional spray-drying. In spray-drying, brewed coffee is broken into droplets and dried rapidly with hot air. Freeze-drying uses lower temperatures and vacuum conditions, helping retain more of coffee's delicate flavor compounds.

Commercial freeze-dried coffee gained momentum in the early 1960s. Maxwell House introduced Maxim in 1963, helping bring freeze-dried instant coffee to a much wider market. It offered consumers a richer aroma and flavor than many earlier instant coffees. Nestlé followed in 1965 with Nescafé Gold Blend, strengthening competition and encouraging further improvements in quality and production.

During the 1970s, freeze-dried coffee production expanded internationally. Coffee-producing countries also began adopting the technology to add value to their beans rather than exporting only raw coffee. Colombia, for example, developed industrial freeze-drying capacity during this period.

Today, freeze-dried coffee remains popular worldwide. Modern manufacturers carefully control freezing, vacuum pressure, temperature, and packaging to preserve aroma while producing a convenient product. Although it cannot completely reproduce the experience of freshly brewed coffee, freeze-drying represents a remarkable combination of food science and industrial technology. It transformed instant coffee from a basic convenience product into a sophisticated beverage capable of retaining much of the character of the original brew.
The History of Freeze-Dried Coffee

Coffee percolator

The first coffee drinkers impressed by the aroma of the dried beans, they put them in cold water and drank the liquor saturated with their aromatic principles.

Crushing the raw beans and hulls, and steeping them in water, was a later improvement. The history of coffee maker can be traced back to the Turks who are known to have brewed great coffee as early as 575 AD.

Coffee gained popularity among the regular people of England in the early 1700s. Bull’s roasting machine was patented in England in 1704, marking the first use of coal for commercial coffee roasting.

The M. Biggin pot was invented in 1763 by a Parisian tinsmith named Donmartin, first name unknown. By the 1780s, they were common in wealthy Parisian homes. It came into common use in England for making coffee about 1817. It was simply a squat earthenware pot with an upper, movable, strainer part made of tin, after the French drip pot pattern.

The coffee biggin with which Americans are most familiar is a pot containing a flannel bag or a cylindrical wire strainer to hold the ground coffee through which the boiling water is poured.

A coffee percolator was invented in Paris about 1806 by Benjamin Thompson, F.R.S., an American-British scientist, philanthropist, and administrator. He was known as Count Rumford, a title bestowed on him by the Pope.

In United States, the first patent for a coffee percolator was filed by American James Nason in 1865. This was later improved to a stove top percolator by Hanson Goodrich in 1869.
Coffee percolator

Invention of coffee roaster by Jabez Burns

By the final third of the 19th century, coffee was already a 1,000-year-old drink. And throughout all that time, coffee beans needed to be roasted before they could be used to brew coffee. Initially this was done in open pans and then, from the beginning of the 18th century and for many decades after, in hand operated cylindrical roasters over an open flame or a brazier.

The first successful commercial coffee roaster was invented in 1864 by Jabez Burns, who came to New York from London in 1845 and found employment with coffee and spice merchants.

Mr. Burns was born in London in 1826. Experimenting with more reliable method for roasting coffee beans, he realized that the key was not to allow the beans to rest directly on a hot surface, where the quickly scorch. Burns devised a screw-like device to keep the beans moving as they roasted. He took out his first patent for an industrial roaster in 1864.

He founded the business of Jabez Burns & Sons in 1864, beginning the manufacture of his patent coffee roaster at 107 Warren Street New York.

In 1934 the Jabez Burns company developed a machine that applied no heat whatsoever to the drum itself. The burns machine dispensed with the heat outside the drum, instead relying on a high-velocity blast of hot air roaring through the drum, thus roasting the coffee more by contact with hot air than by contact with hot metal.
Invention of coffee roaster by Jabez Burns

Coffee roasting

Home roasting persisted in Mediterranean countries like Italy until well after World War II, and many drinkers in the Middle East and the horn of Africa still roast their own coffee as part of leisurely ritual combining roasting, brewing and dinking in one long sitting.

According to the legend, Muslim Sheikh Omar who was exiled to an infertile region of Arabia in about 1260 and according to one version of his legend discovered the benefits of roasted coffee while trying to avoid starvation by making a soup of coffee seeds. Finding them bitter, he roasted them before boiling them.

According to coffee expert Ian Bersten, he speculates that Syria is the likely location of the first truly roasted coffee, since Syrians, particularly in the city of Damascus, had developed the technology necessary to produce metal cookware.

At the early point in coffee history, probably before 1600, a somewhat different approach to coffee roasting and cuisine developed in Turkey, Syria and Egypt. The beans were brought to a very dark, almost black color, ground to a very fine powder, using either a millstone or a grinder with metal burns, and boiled and served with sugar.

Although Europeans traditionally imported the highest quality beams, American drank the most coffee per capita. Industrial coffee roasting began in the 1860s.

In the mid-nineteenth century, cylindrical, round and boxy coffee roasters came on the market in large numbers equipped with methods of agitating the beans to assure an even roast. In 1849, the inventor Thomas R. Wood of Cincinnati, Ohio, patented a hinged globe mounted on a three-legged frame with a bail for rotating beans as they heated on a hearth or stove.

The first successful commercial coffee roaster was invented in 1864 by Jabez Burns, who came to New York from London in 1845 and found employment with coffee and spice merchants. Burns devised a screw-like device to keep the beans moving as they roasted.

Continuous roasters are now frequently used by large-volume roasters. Reflectance-color meters are now used almost universally to characterize roast completeness and character.
Coffee roasting

Coffee decaffeination process: the history

From its earliest history, there were health concerns regarding coffee and its effects. Decaffeinated coffee was first developed commercially in Europe 1900.

Decaffeination with chemical solvents such as methylenchloride or acetyl acetate was first successfully applied by Roselius in ’Kaffee HAG’. Dr. Ludwig Roselius’ original process for decaffeinating coffee was patented in Germany in 1905.

Before the First World War Roselius extended his business to the United States and built a coffee extraction plant at New Brunswick, New Jersey.

In USA the patent issued to Meyer, Roselius and Wimmer in 1908. The process as described in a 1908 patent consists of first, moisturizing green coffee to at least 20% to facilitated transport of caffeine through the cell wall and then contacting the moistened beans with solvents.

Until the 1980s, synthetic organic solvents commonly were used in the United States to extract the caffeine. 

The so called ‘water decaffeination’ process was developed as an alternative by General Foods around 1941 and was patented in 1943.

In the early 1980s, coffee was implicated as a possible cause of birth defects, benign breast lumps, pancreatic cancer and heart disease. Sales of decaffeinated coffee rose dramatically.

Until the mid-90s, decaffeinated coffee was considered to be flavorless, bitter and a poor substitute for regular coffee. As the process of decaffeination has improved, so has its market share with nearly 30 percent of the specialty and gourmet coffees being decaffeinated.
Coffee decaffeination process: the history

History of instant coffee

It history is link to wars; military commanders had long sought a way to give their troops in the field a caffeine boosts without having to carry along cumbersome brewing equipment.

In 1771, the British granted a patent for a ‘coffee compound’ and in the late nineteenth century a Glasgow firm invented Camp Coffee, a liquid ‘essence’.

In the 1900 the Tokyo chemist Sartori Kato made a version of instant coffee. In 1901, he began introducing the American public to powdered coffee at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, new York.

In United States, the earliest experiments with and patent for, instant coffee date to the civil war. As an outgrowth of these experiments, a European immigrant named George Washington produced the first commercially viable instant coffee in the United States beginning in 1906.

While aiding Brazil in marketing a surplus of beans, Nestle, developed its instant coffee, Nescafe, which retained flavorful oils through a process of freeze drying. Nestle started marketing Nescafe in 1938 and quickly dominated the market.

After World War II, instant coffee became popular in America, prompting an increase in the growth of inferior robusta beans for the cheap blends used for soluble coffee.
History of instant coffee