You don’t have to be a roaster to be a great barista, but knowing a bit about how your coffee is roasted can give you a new understanding of the power of the bean. You’ve probably been to a café where a huge coffee roaster is on display, churning away to its precise instructions (if you haven’t, you should—it’s pretty impressive).
Like much of the coffee industry, this process was hidden for a long time but is now opening up to professionals and amateurs alike. Raw, green coffee beans, as you’ve probably figured out, aren’t much use (fad diets aside).
They have to be roasted to make them consumable and to unlock all those delicious coffee flavors. As the roasting temperature increases, raw coffee is transformed (chemically and physiologically) and each tiny adjustment affects the final brew’s flavor. When it comes to specialty coffee, roasters meticulously control the process to tease out a spectrum of flavors— it’s about getting the most you can out of a bean.
Technically, you can become a specialty roaster by just roasting specialty coffee and selling it (a little like being a DJ—it’s impressive and all the cool kids are doing it, but there’s no certification process to go through before you can call yourself one).
There’s really no way to know a great roaster from a so-so roaster except by trying some of their coffee and seeing if you like it. That’s not to undermine those really talented roasters—it takes a great palate, a lot of practice, some bang-on intuition and a fair number of scorched batches of coffee to get the knack.
The Roasters Guild, an official trade guild of the Specialty Coffee Association of America, has established a certification for roasters—both experienced and just starting out. Roasting is considered an art, rather than just an industrial process
The Roasting Process
Rob Forsyth, president of the Australian Specialty Coffee Association, has been in the business for around forty years and says he’s seen the number of cafés roasting their own beans—and offering them for retail sale—at least triple in the past five years, so there must be something in it. The roaster controls the transfer of heat to the beans by adjusting airflow, gas levels, drum speed, charge weight and the biggie, time.
Each tiny adjustment can make a huge difference to the final flavor. Roasters use sight, sound and smell to judge how the coffee is coming along, watching it change color, listening out for the loud “cracks” (the sound the beans make as the heat causes them to release gases) and inhaling all that lovely (cough) coffee smoke
There are many ways to describe the roasting process, but it goes roughly along these lines:
Drying: The beans steam, changing from green to a brownish yellow, and might start smelling a bit grassy, or like burlap or bread.
First development: Beans start to give off that familiar coffee smell, turn light brown and begin to smoke.
First crack: Beans make a loud crackling sound, the sign that the beans’ fibers are splitting and they’ve started to roast.
Second development: From here, the beans start to expand and darken as they caramelize. Depending on taste, the roast can be stopped at any time after the first crack reaches its crescendo, and most single-origin roasts are best stopped between this stage and the first few rustles of the second crack.
Second crack: The second crack is like a last warning, where timing becomes essential. It’s quieter than the first crack, more like the sound of crinkling paper. As the second crack gets louder and smoke fills the air, the beans become very dark.
No! Stop! Too far!: The beans are burnt. Any coffee made from these will taste a bit like rubbery charcoal.
Post a Comment