5 things that help with making instant coffee taste decent

Freeze-dried instant coffee keeps far more of its original aroma than spray-dried powder, because it's dried by sublimation at low temperature instead of being blasted with roughly 250C air, so the delicate volatile compounds survive instead of cooking off. Spray-drying is cheaper and faster, which is why it dominates the bottom shelves, but the heat that makes it fast is exactly what flattens the taste into that generic 'instant' flavour everyone recognises. The trap is that 'premium' or 'gourmet' branding doesn't tell you which process you got - plenty of nicely packaged tubs are still spray-dried underneath the nicer label.

Wetting a spoonful of granules in a small splash of hot water before you add the rest gives trapped aromatics liquid to dissolve into, instead of a rush of steam to escape into the moment a full mug of hot water hits them. It's the same instinct as blooming ground coffee, just for a different reason - you're not releasing trapped CO2, you're stopping smell from flashing off into the air above your mug. It also fixes the gritty last mouthful that comes from granules clumping when they hit a full mug or cold milk all at once, so you get a smoother cup from the first sip to the last, not just a more fragrant one.

Water straight off a rolling boil scalds the aromatic compounds in instant coffee, giving even a decent jar a flat, slightly acrid edge you'd normally blame on the brand. Instant granules are already fully water-soluble - they were brewed and dried once already - so unlike ground coffee they don't need near-boiling water to dissolve; they do that just as completely a good ten degrees cooler. The 'pour on boiling water' line on the jar is there so it dissolves reliably on any kettle, not because it tastes better that way.

A pinch of salt suppresses your tongue's perception of bitterness at the receptor level, which is a completely different mechanism from sugar, which just piles a competing sweet taste on top of bitterness that's still sitting there underneath. It matters more for instant specifically because drying concentrates the bitter compounds relative to the sweeter, more fragile ones that don't survive processing as well, so the bitterness you're tasting is already out of proportion to begin with. You want an amount so small you can't identify it as salt at all - just a coffee that suddenly reads as smoother.

Resealing the jar properly and keeping it away from the kettle's steam stops the granules clumping and staling months before the best-before date does its job, which is why an eight-month-old jar can taste noticeably worse than one you opened last week using identical technique. Instant coffee is a dry, hygroscopic powder that pulls moisture straight out of the air, and parking it beside a kettle that steams every morning is one of the fastest ways to both cake the granules and drive off aromatic compounds that were already in short supply. None of the other four fixes matter much if the coffee's already gone stale and clumped in storage.