In Australia all coffee is pretty good. I visited Sydney fora week a couple years ago for business and the lattes and espressos blew my mind. I have had good coffee but that is a whole different level. After I have always been picky about coffee (mostly espresso drinks) and now I am even more pickier thanks to the amazing coffee I had there.

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> ... and the mix of ingredients that doesn't trigger any reflux

Ah reflux! I drink way too much coffee since forever and recently asked my doc about it: he told me that if I had no reflux, then I simply shouldn't worry about it. Some people have reflux with coffee, others don't. I drink more coffee than 99% of the population and I get zero reflux. Since decades.

It's a cool article but in a way many coffee became instant coffee: as my coffee machine is often already warm (wife btw she's also a heavy coffee drinker), it's actually more instant to have my full auto coffee machine ground the beans and make a coffee than it'd take to boil water for an instant coffee. Same for the people doing the (very costly compared to beans) capsule coffee thing: it's ultra quick (and one of the reason capsule coffee like Nespresso conquered so many).

P.S: I'll try your mocha trick!

The good news is that boiling water is not functionally necessary since the extraction was done up front. I drink it cold or with warm water. Boiling is hotter than I want to drink anyway.

If there's significant scale at the bottom it's possible it's making your kettle materially less efficient. If you put in like a cup of vinegar and a cup of water (you could probably dilute it more than that), heat it up and swish it around (it doesn't need to be boiling), it should all come off.

USB-C PD has far lower wattage than the wall outlet anywhere in the world. Now I want someone to build a kettle that accepts a J1772 connection (for charging electric vehicles). That’s nowadays more common than any 240V NEMA outlets.

This guy (sunshine) designed a 3d-printed mocha pot that boils in half the time over a flame. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LuZiqLb70tM

U. K. 240v vs. 120v in the U. S., twice the voltage == twice the amperage (EDIT: oops, wattage, for the same amps) == half the time to boiling. I will note that doubling the voltage will still not make it "instant". For that I think you need liquid oxygen[0].

[0] https://improbable.com/2018/10/26/a-look-back-at-george-gobl...

Does it? It only takes like 2 min for my electric kettle to boil. If I was a more avid coffee/tea drinker, I’d get one of the always heated hot water dispensers that are common in Japanese households (def one of the appliances I miss since moving back to the US). Then you never have to wait.

In electric kettles or a microwave or even in a moka pot or another small container on a decent induction stove it's just 2-3 minutes. There was a video I can't find where they increased the voltage or something for a kettle and at one point it boiled the water in like 10-15 seconds.

I just use the microwave TBH. 60s and done.

For real instant: install a hot water tap. It has a small boiler under the sink that keeps the water at near boiling. I've got one and it's great - instant tea any time.

Of all the things I have cooked on my induction cooktops over the years, boiling water fast is what I miss when I travel and have to use electric coils.

I'm in the UK but I have a kettle that lets you pick the temperature. I usually just use 50C (122F) for instant if I'm having it black, or 70C (158F) for a splash of milk. Boiling water would make an already miserable experience far more miserable.

The UK is not an outlier here. Much of the world has the same voltage.

If you’re brewing from ground you really don’t want boiling 212F water as you’ll burn the grounds. I do my pour over at 185F and get smooth ready to drink hot coffee with no/low acidity.

> A lot of 'premium' branded instant coffee is ~£42/kg. That's £3/kg more than my premium, locally-roasted, single-estate Colombian coffee beans.

That weight comparison doesn't make sense. How many cups of coffee do you get from your beans versus the instant? I just checked the jar I have here for my lazy weekends, it's ~2g per cup of coffee (rounding up, it's a bit under 200g and it makes about 100 cups). So a kg of instant would be around 500 cups of coffee. I don't think your 1kg of beans will produce that many cups.

> A lot of 'premium' branded instant coffee is ~£42/kg. That's £3/kg more than my premium, locally-roasted, single-estate Colombian coffee beans.

You need 7-10 times less instant coffee to make a cup though, so your beans are a lot more expensive in the end. From my experience, cup of coffee is either 2 grams of Nescafe Gold or 16 grams of beans.

In terms of the volume of the final beverage, 1kg of instant coffee goes a lot further than 1kg of whole bean coffee does.

I don't measure coffee by weight when making the stuff (I use the eyebolic method with the coffee grinder, and the equally-imprecise heaping spoonful method with instant), but some homework suggests that it takes ~60g of whole bean coffee, or ~9g of instant coffee, to produce 1 liter of beverage.

If a coffee cup holds 300ml (as the normal US-centric one I picked from my cabinet does), then when we use your prices we get:

~£0.702 per cup from premium, locally-roasted, single-estate Columbia coffee beans

~£0.1134 per cup from 'premium' instant coffee.

...which makes instant a whole heckuva lot less expensive to drink. :)