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Or is this what ends up as instant?
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yep, you connected the dots correctly. sorry, i left that info out inadvertantly. After the "mother liquor" is all collected, it gets centrifuged and concentrated, and then it goes through freeze-drying to make it into a very fine powder, and since you don't package coffee powders, the powder gets sent to an agglomoration unit where basically the powder turns into those packed crumbs. The whole plant smells like coffee..which can be either good or bad, but I mostly liked it.
That plant also of course has roasters to just roast the beans to whatever flavors and the roasted beans are then ground, and then packaged and sent off.
The "extreme" part of the plant was the decaffeination unit. That's also a tall, slim tower with counter-current flow of beans and the stuff that removes caffeine from the beans. That stuff used to be a chemical that's now termed as a possible carcinogen and so it's not used anymore. Now they use super-saturated CO2... which can be a hazard if there's a leak, so that part of plant always had restricted access. The caffeine that gets recovered is also turned into a powder and the #1 purchaser was Coca Cola...
Half the time I was there, I worked on the instant coffee-- "soluble" side. And because it has the most engineering and gadgets and units involved, I guess I liked working there! hehe
But there's engineering involved in the roaster side too. The beans have to be pre-soaked so that they can swell-up and be ready to roast and give out the flavor and aroma; but they can never have more than a certain amount of moisture all through the process. I in fact installed an in-line moisture analyzer to keep it in check--otherwise the beans can start to rot in a matter of days and that means you just lost your product.
It was a food plant so hygiene was at good level. We all also got as much free coffee as we wanted! hehe And that plant was well-integrated and automated wherever possible, so it's not like the final product is bad or inedible. The packaging lines were the coolest things to see...how bottles get lined up, vaccuum-cleaned, filled, weighed, sealed, and capped, and then even packed into big boxes and palletized. The single-serve package line was the newest and coolest...that one plant pretty much makes all Maxwell House single serve packages for all the hotels in the u.s. that have maxwell house coffee in their rooms. And, afterall, it was Teddy Roosevelt who famously tasted the Maxwell House coffee and after one cup, proclaimed it "good to the last drop!"
But most people out there haven't a clue how any of the processed foods get to where they're "ready to eat".... I think the whey and gelatin and cheese factories would be awesome place to practice engineering but wouldn't want to see how your food gets made! haha Ever wonder how Valveeta "cheese" is made into that block?! lol
I've been to a Lay's potato chips plant also and that was really fun! It's all quite automated and the technology used is amazing. They have a scanner that scans each and every potato chip after its been through the fryer to look at its color and tell whether its over-fried and thus burnt, or not fried enough..those that don't meet the criteria get sorted out and junked on a real-time assembly-line basis. And hardly any human supervision is needed! That's why Lay's chips are all pretty consistent, bag after bag.
okay well, enough with all this. i got fond memories!
11-17-2006, 09:56 AM
