Coffee aficionados no longer need to choose between convenience and quality. Have a Ritual Instant Coffee 5-pack on hand for the next time you need an easy cup of coffee. The new line is a collaboration with our partners and instant coffee experts at Swift Cup Coffee. You can buy it now in our webstore, at one of our four Bay Area cafés, and at Northern California Whole Foods stores.
Each new instant coffee offering will be carefully chosen by Ritual’s green coffee sourcing team. Expect some of Ritual’s favorite coffees from their long-standing producer relationships. Each serving comes in an eco-friendly sachet in festive gold-foiled 5-pack boxes perfect for stocking stuffers or gifts for any coffee enthusiast this holiday season.
What tasting notes can I look forward to?
At Ritual, we’ve been sourcing and roasting seasonally fresh, single-origin coffees from farmers that we know, some for nearly fifteen years! For us, it’s about finding the best quality coffees and then roasting and brewing them in a way that brings out their unique nuances. Our philosophy is the same for instant coffee.
After a lot of experimentation, we’re really starting to understand which whole bean coffees translate the best into instant coffee, and we’ve discovered that the bright, delicately-fruited flavor profiles of our Ethiopian coffees shine through perfectly. Typical tasting notes of coffees from that region that come through in the instant sachets include punchy flavors like ripe peaches and raspberry jam, but also more subtle floral and citrus highlights, such as chamomile tea and yuzu.
Will the instant coffee be single-origin?
We’ve found that instant coffee is never better than the ingredients we start with, so we’ll continue to focus on choosing high quality, single-origin coffees, and we’ll choose the perfect offering for each batch based on the season. Since it’s produced in small batches and because we want it to be as fresh as possible for our customers, we’ll just make one batch at a time for now, each from a single origin. We started with one of our very favorite coffees – an heirloom variety produced at the Hama Cooperative in Ethiopia, where we’ve been buying excellent coffee for twelve years.
How is Ritual Instant Coffee made?
We are so proud to work with our partners and instant coffee experts at Swift Cup Coffee. They’ve developed a method of producing instant coffee with the specialty coffee consumer in mind, but it wasn’t easy. It’s actually very difficult to produce instant coffee that tastes good, not to mention that it’s very labor and time intensive. The biggest challenge for them lies in the ability to preserve the aromatics and nuances that make each coffee so special in the first place.
Here’s how the process works. First, the coffee is brewed into a very flavorful, high-extraction concentrate. From there, it is frozen to subzero temperatures, around -60 degrees Fahrenheit. Then, under a vacuum, the coffee is dehydrated slowly and gently over a period of a couple of days. That is the process of “freeze-drying”, whereby the ice in the concentrate is turned into gas. All of the water is slowly removed from the coffee concentrate so that eventually, all that’s left is the soluble material that will later dissolve during the brewing process. When it’s removed from the freeze dryer, it looks like a big slab of brownie that is then ground up into smaller particle sizes. From there, you brew it by adding hot water, which brings the solubles back to life.
Eileen’s tips for brewing the perfect Ritual Instant Coffee
I like to mix a sachet of instant coffee with 10 ounces of hot water, but for a stronger cup, I recommend 8 ounces of water. The water can be right off boiling around 205 degrees, but it will also dissolve in water at 165 degrees if you want to sip your coffee sooner.
Instant coffee can also be a substitute ingredient for recipes that call for cold brew concentrate or espresso. For example, I love to make cold coffee drinks at home that are inspired by seasonal signature beverages served at our cafes, such as the iced version of the Golden Lady, which is made with ginger syrup, oat milk, and turmeric (see recipe below).
Some people love to add instant coffee to their favorite alternative milks or protein shakes. There are also many culinary applications for instant coffee; if you’ve ever made a chocolate cake from scratch then you know what I’m talking about!
