For fifty years "instant" meant cheap: a jar of bitter crystals for people who didn't care about coffee. That reputation was earned by what was in the jar, not by the method. Made properly — from organic Arabica, water-decaffeinated, lab-tested — instant coffee is now the cleanest, most precise cup you can make, and the only common way to brew that never pushes near-boiling water through plastic. Here's how it's actually made, what happens inside a pod machine or a drip brewer that nobody mentions, and why the premium end of coffee is quietly going instant.
How instant coffee is actually made
Instant coffee is not a different plant or a chemical shortcut. It is brewed coffee with the water taken back out. The industry name is "soluble coffee," and the process has five stages:
- Roast and grind. Green beans are roasted and ground exactly as they would be for any other coffee. The quality ceiling is set here: a cheap Robusta blend makes cheap instant, and a single-origin organic Arabica makes premium instant. Nothing later in the process can add quality that wasn't in the bean.
- Extract. The grounds are brewed in large stainless-steel percolation columns with hot water under pressure — a bigger, hotter, more thorough version of what a drip machine does. The result is strong liquid coffee. The volatile aroma compounds that would otherwise boil off are captured at this stage and added back at the end.
- Concentrate. Water is removed by evaporation or by freezing out ice crystals, until the liquid is a thick coffee concentrate.
- Dry. This is the step that defines instant coffee. Spray drying atomizes the concentrate into a tower of hot air; the droplets dry in seconds into fine powder, which is why spray-dried coffee dissolves almost instantly, hot or cold. Freeze drying freezes the concentrate solid, breaks it into granules and sublimates the ice away under vacuum. Both produce coffee that is nothing but coffee — no carriers, no fillers, no preservatives.
- Pack. The dried coffee goes into its final container with the recovered aroma. For COFFREE that container is a single-serve stick, filled with dry powder at room temperature and sealed.
The thing to notice is what the process removes and what it leaves. It removes water, grounds and the need for any equipment at your end. It leaves the soluble compounds you actually taste — and whatever was in the beans, which is why testing the beans matters so much (more on that below).
What your coffee maker is made of
Every popular way to brew coffee at home or at work has the same step in common: water at or near boiling passes through, sits in, or sprays against plastic on its way to your cup.
Pod machines. A K-Cup is a polypropylene (#5 plastic) cup with a foil lid and a filter inside — Keurig's own recycling page says so. The machine punctures the pod and forces water at roughly 190°F through it under pressure, out of a plastic-lined needle, and into your mug. The water's entire path, from the reservoir through the pump, the heating element's housing and the pod itself, is plastic. Nespresso-style capsules are mostly aluminum, which solves the pod problem but not the machine's internal plastics.
Drip machines. The water reservoir, the tube that carries water to the heating element, the shower head that sprays it over the grounds and the basket that holds the filter are almost all plastic, usually polypropylene, sometimes polycarbonate. "BPA-free" addresses one chemical; it says nothing about particles. The water sits in that reservoir, is heated inside that housing, and drips through that basket every single morning for years, and the surfaces wear.
Single-use cups and some tea bags. Paper takeaway cups are lined with polyethylene; "silky" pyramid tea bags are often nylon or PET. These have been studied more than coffee makers, and the results are the reason to care about the coffee makers.
What happens when hot water meets plastic
Heat is the variable. Plastic that is fine holding cold water sheds measurably more when the water is hot, and the studies that have looked are not subtle:
microplastic particles — plus about 3.1 billion nanoplastics — released by a single plastic (nylon/PET) tea bag steeped for five minutes at 95°C. McGill University, Environmental Science & Technology, 2019.
microplastic particles per litre released from polypropylene bottles when hot water is used to prepare formula — the same #5 polypropylene used for K-Cups. Release rose sharply with water temperature. Trinity College Dublin, Nature Food, 2020.
mean concentration of plastic found in the blood of healthy adult donors — most commonly PET, polystyrene and polyethylene — in the first study to quantify it. Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Environment International, 2022.
No one has yet published a definitive particle count for a K-Cup machine or a drip brewer, and we won't invent one. But the ingredients are the same — polypropylene, near-boiling water, pressure, repeated use — and the direction of every result so far is the same. A 2025 study in Nature Medicine found microplastics, mostly polyethylene, in every human brain sample examined, at levels roughly 50% higher in 2024 brains than in 2016 ones. What that does to us is still being worked out; the honest summary of the science is "we don't know yet, and the amount is rising." Given that, a brewing method that keeps hot water away from plastic altogether isn't paranoia. It's just the simpler choice.
And then we tested the coffee itself
Avoiding plastic in the brewer is only half of it, because plastic can arrive in the beans — from processing water, from equipment, from the environment. So we had the finished sticks screened. Eurofins Scientific ran a 10-polymer microplastics panel (20–500 µm, confocal Raman microscopy) on prepared COFFREE: the 0% Decaf returned no microplastics detected across all ten polymers, and the 100% Regular returned none at or above the lab's reporting limit of 20 particles per litre (one polymer, polyethylene, showed an estimated trace below that limit). Both were also re-checked for mold and yeast: under 10 CFU/g. The report is downloadable below. We're not aware of another coffee brand that publishes one.
The "instant is cheap coffee" myth
Instant got its reputation in the mid-20th century, when the category was built on the cheapest beans available — commodity Robusta, chosen for yield and caffeine, spray-dried in bulk and sold by the jar. The method got blamed for the ingredients. That's backwards. Spray drying and freeze drying are more expensive and more technically demanding than putting grounds in a bag; the only reason the end product was cheap is that the coffee going in was cheap.
Run the same process on good coffee and you get a different product. Here's what has to be true for an instant coffee to sit at the top of the category rather than the bottom:
| What it takes | Commodity instant | COFFREE |
|---|---|---|
| Beans | Robusta blends, mixed origins | 100% Arabica, single-origin, high-elevation Mexican, USDA Organic |
| Decaffeination | Methylene chloride or ethyl acetate solvents | Water process only — no chemical solvents |
| Mold & mycotoxin testing | Rarely, never published | Genista Biosciences: mold, heat-resistant mold, ochratoxin A, aflatoxins — reports published |
| Microplastics testing | No | Eurofins, 10 polymers — decaf: none detected |
| Heavy metals | Not published | Tested (lead, arsenic, cadmium, mercury) |
| Caffeine control | One strength, unmeasured | Six measured levels, 0 to 135 mg per stick |
| Additives | Often fillers, "coffee mixes," creamers | None — coffee only |
Price tells the same story once you count everything. A pod machine costs $100–200 up front and the pods run roughly $0.60–1.00 each for ordinary coffee; a drip setup needs the machine, filters and beans; a café coffee is $4–6. A COFFREE stick is a little over a dollar, needs nothing but water, and comes with a lab report. "Low cost" was never the point of instant. Low friction was — and that's exactly the quality that makes it the right format for coffee you want to control precisely.
Why the premium end of coffee is going instant
Three things only instant can do well, and they happen to be the three things serious coffee drinkers are asking for now.
Precision. Caffeine in a brewed cup varies with the beans, the grind, the water temperature, the brew time and the cup size — the same "medium coffee" can be 90 mg or 200 mg. A dried, measured stick is the same every time. That's what makes six caffeine levels possible at all; you can't offer "45 mg" on a drip machine. For anyone stepping caffeine down (here's how to do that without changing your routine), pregnant, or managing blood pressure or sleep, that precision is the whole product.
Cleanliness you can verify. Because the coffee is finished before it reaches you, the finished product can be tested — for mold and mycotoxins, microplastics, heavy metals — and the result applies to exactly what you drink. A bag of beans can be tested too, but nothing checks what your machine adds afterward.
Portability without compromise. The same cup at your desk, on a flight, at a campsite or in a hotel room, hot or iced, in three seconds, with no equipment to clean. Freeze-dried and spray-dried specialty coffee has been the fastest-growing corner of the category for a reason: the people who care most about coffee are also the ones who won't accept a bad cup when they travel.
Put those together and the old hierarchy flips. The jar of crystals was the bottom of the market because of what went into it. A sealed stick of organic, water-processed, lab-tested Arabica in a measured dose is the top of it — and it skips the plastic on the way to your mug. Instant is the new premium.
See what's in the stick.
Every claim here is backed by a published report. Download them, then pick your level.
Six caffeine levels, one organic single-origin Arabica, no machine.
Find your caffeine level → Shop all levels →Frequently asked questions
Is instant coffee real coffee?
Yes. It is brewed coffee that has been concentrated and dried — by spray drying or freeze drying — so it dissolves when you add water. Nothing is added; the quality depends entirely on the beans that went in.
Do K-Cups contain plastic?
Yes. Keurig states that K-Cup pods are made of #5 polypropylene, with a foil lid and an internal filter. The machine forces near-boiling water through the pod under pressure.
Does hot water really release microplastics from plastic?
Studies have measured it directly: around 11.6 billion microplastics from a single plastic tea bag at 95°C (2019), and up to 16.2 million particles per litre from polypropylene bottles prepared with hot water (2020), with release increasing as temperature rises. Coffee makers specifically haven't been quantified yet.
Is instant coffee lower quality than ground coffee?
Not inherently. Commodity instant was made from cheap Robusta, which gave the category its reputation. Instant made from organic single-origin Arabica, water-decaffeinated and lab-tested, is a premium product — and it can be tested as a finished product, which ground coffee brewed through a machine cannot.
Has COFFREE been tested for microplastics?
Yes. Eurofins Scientific screened prepared COFFREE across 10 polymer types (20–500 µm). The 0% Decaf showed no microplastics detected; the 100% Regular showed none at or above the 20 particles-per-litre reporting limit. The report is available for download on this page.
Is COFFREE's stick packaging plastic?
The stick is a sealed laminate film that holds dry coffee at room temperature. Hot water never passes through it — you tear it open and pour the coffee into your mug — so there is no hot-water contact with packaging, unlike a pod or a drip machine.
Sources: Hernandez LM et al., "Plastic Teabags Release Billions of Microparticles and Nanoparticles into Tea," Environmental Science & Technology (2019); Li D et al., "Microplastic release from the degradation of polypropylene feeding bottles during infant formula preparation," Nature Food (2020); Leslie HA et al., "Discovery and quantification of plastic particle pollution in human blood," Environment International (2022); Nihart AJ et al., "Bioaccumulation of microplastics in decedent human brains," Nature Medicine (2025); Keurig, "Recyclable K-Cup pods" (keurig.com/recyclable); Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Instant coffee"; Eurofins SFA report AR-26-T6-000398-01 (2026); Genista Biosciences Certificates of Analysis for COFFREE (2025). Figures for pod and café prices are typical US retail ranges. This article is for general information and is not medical advice.