Mastertons Coffee has developed a new freeze dried instant coffee for the South African market and we were gifted some to try. It is safe to safe that we were a little sceptical going in to this particular coffee tasting!
We chatted to Ryler Masterton to see how this product came about:
"As with so many other businesses in SA, C19 and the lockdowns have had a significantly negative impact on our business, so we’ve had to innovate and look for new opportunities to create revenue streams to cover our losses and drive our business forward through this new harsher trading environment. We’d internally discussed bringing to market a quality instant coffee for some time, but it was really all the challenges of 2020 that motivated and necessitated this addition to our product stable. Our core focus will always be our freshly roasted coffee, but we’re happy to now be able to cater to almost all coffee drinkers in SA."
In the coffee world at large, instant coffee has in recent years gained some traction in the specialty world, with coffee professionals realising that convenience is paramount for a lot of peoples coffee buying choices.
There are two main options when it comes to instant coffee, both require the coffee to be brewed first, into a coffee concentrate. Spray drying and freeze drying are the processes that follow with freeze drying generally considered to produce the less bitter outcome. It involves quite a few more steps than spray drying.
As you can see from the video below, the beans used in the process are generally not of the greatest quality. But that doesn’t mean that the process is necessarily bad. So theoretically, if you use good quality and well roasted beans at the beginning of this process then you have a really easy way to enjoy quality coffee.
We were pleasantly surprised! No bitterness to be found here. It was smooth (I had mine as I normally would, with a dash of milk) and full-bodied. It didn't taste like any of the regular supermarket brands, which in my opinion, is a very good thing. It tasted like coffee! Yay! I even found myself under time pressure this very morning, and instead of skipping coffee all together, was able to quickly make a mug of this and get some caffeine into the system, which I was very grateful for.
So if you see it on the shelves at your local supermarket, give it a try! Or you can order it online from them.
