If you're just now joining the conversation, here are links to the first two posts in the series.
You're probably itching to get started with the actual roast process and I don't blame you! However, I'm going to torture you with just a little more information, first.
What exactly is a coffee bean? Most people when they hear 'coffee bean' think about a dark brown to almost black already roasted coffee bean. I'm not really going to go into history as a quick google search will keep you reading for a long time. I will note that the origin of all coffee plants is Ethiopia. What's more important, in my opinion, is to know that there are actually two major species of coffee. There is
Robusta and
Arabica with roughly a 40%/60% production split respectively. Robusta is characterized by being more bitter, partly attributable to a higher caffeine content, with lower acidity and sugar content. Robusta is generally considered a lower quality bean used for instant coffees, as filler in less expensive blends, and for some espresso blends. Arabica is the bean of choice for the best tasting cup by most objective and subjective standards.
This article goes into a lot more detail about the differences and the remainder of my writing will be about Arabica beans unless stated specifically otherwise.
What you know as a coffee bean is actually (typically) one of two seeds. These seeds are the 'pit' of a fruit called a coffee cherry. A bean is wrapped in a parchment. The beans/seeds in their parchment are surrounded by mucilage/pectin which is then covered by pulp and a skin. I particularly like
this photo. What's important to know is that when you buy 'green coffee' to home roast, everything up to and including the parchment has been removed in various stages and manners of processing.
This article and
this article do an even better job of covering this concept and lead to some additional great reading!
If you go through
Sweet Maria's for your coffee then you don't have to worry if you're getting properly grown beans, beans with defects, diseases, or damage. You also don't have to figure out if the coffee is a good varietal, from a good farm, with a good crop for the current season. You don't have to wonder if the coffee was properly processed, packaged, stored, and shipped. Importantly, Sweet Maria's has also demonstrated an awareness for sustainability and fair compensation and labor practices.
A lot of people think that roasted coffee should be very dark brown to black with an oily sheen. One of the reasons for this is that large chain coffee shops such as *$*$*$ (not naming them to avoid any legal issues) depend on delivering the same product every single time while sourcing the most affordable beans they can to maximize profits. This consistency is achieved by the fact that burnt always tastes the same.
I hope to introduce you to what is possible between just minimally roasted and not quite burnt. The general rule is that the lighter you roast, the more you will taste the individual characteristics and complexity of any given bean and the darker you roast the more you will taste the roast itself. Often, the best flavor is somewhere in the middle, but every bean and every crop is different.
Thank you for hanging with me... let's move on to
Home Coffee Roasting 201 and the actual roast process, shall we?
