Bloggle

After a bit of a hiatus I’m back at the roaster in the garage. Why the break? It’s been chilly lately — it’s winter in Vermont, after all — and besides, my roaster doesn’t perform so well when the ambient temperature is anything less than 40 degrees. Neither do I fare all too well hanging around waiting for it to get its heat on. Oh sure, I know there’s hard-core roasters who don their parkas and mittens to roast outdoors all times of the year. That kind of insane and slavish devotion I save for barbecue alone, thanks.

I haven’t ordered any new green coffee of late (see the bit about it being cold) and so what I have left is really remnants of seasons past… in some cases, several seasons past. Some Ethiopian coffees from the last eCafe competition, Guatemalan greens from the spring before, and some Sumatra from — gosh, I really can’t be sure — maybe two years ago?

And so I roasted some of just about everything.

The Ethiopian coffee is quite decent, really. For a day or two, anyway; and then the cup just sort of… winds down. Aromatics are fleeting, flavors fading. It’s not a tragic thing, really. It’s just tired.

The Guatemalan beans have a similar tale to tell. Notably, they roast dry and hot — they’ve apparently lost a lot of moisture — and the cup quality is not only faded, but also bitter. Very much so.

The Sumatran beans — the oldest of the lot — well they’re something of a different story. They roast well within parameters I might expect of new crop beans. Fresh from the roaster the cup is quite nice (if a bit sharp.) In a day or two, they’re still quite good; caramel and cocoa aromas, turf and bittersweet chocolate flavors, long and mellow finish. And enough so that I suspect they could keep this up a week more (though I don’t know that they’ll last that long… herselfis a big fan of the coffees of Sumatra.)

Is it something about how Sumatran coffees are processed at the mill that lends them more staying power? Not necessarily… the eCafe Ethopian I sampled was a dry-process (or natural) too.

Was there perhaps more moisture in these beans to begin with, so that they’ve retained more over time? I don’t know… but if there was *that* much moisture I’d wonder that there hadn’t been something icky growing in the bag with them. And besides — they’re more than twice as old as the other beans I’d roasted of late.

Is it something about Sumatra? After all, there’s lots of beans that are marketed as Aged Sumatra… how many other origins actively market aged beans? On purpose? Um… I’m thinking. And coming up empty.

Maybe it’s really about the characteristics the coffee started with. The Ethiopian and Guatemalan beans were both bright, acidy, fruit-forward cups; the Sumatran earthy and dark-toned even when it was young. Perhaps fruit and floral esters are more delicate, more prone to age, while dusky chocolate just gets… mellow.

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If a recent article in the New York Times‘ Style Magazine is right, then everything you think you know about terroir may be wrong. The article — Talk Dirt to Me — takes aim at some long-held thinking about the stuff that makes a wine’s flavor what it is: dirt.

When terroir was first associated with wine, in the 17th-century phrase goût de terroir (literally, “taste of the earth”), it was not intended as a compliment. Its meaning began to change in 1831, when Dr. Morelot, a wealthy landowner in Burgundy, observed in his “Statistique de la Vigne Dans le Département de la Côte-d’Or” that all of the wineries in Burgundy made wine essentially the same way, so the reason some tasted better than others must be due to the terroir — specifically, the substrata underneath the topsoil of a vineyard. Wine, he claimed, derived its flavor from the site’s geology: in essence, from rocks.

(more…)

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In Vermont, it’s said, there’s nine months of winter and three months’ rough sledding. While that’s fine for skiing and snowmobiling and such, it can put a real damper on the aspirations of the dedicated home coffee roaster, banished to the garage or the wide open spaces beyond after that incident with the dark-roast batch that triggered the smoke alarms at midnight.

It’s little surprise, then, that home roasters everywhere — in wintry places, especially — find themselves drawn like so many moths to the flame of a coffee roaster due to hit retailers soon… the Behmor 1600. Its spec sheet is promising: batches of up to one pound, a number of programmed roast profiles and the ability to tweak them on-the-fly at roast-time, quiet operation so you can hear the audible cues of roast progression, and built-in smoke abatement technology. (more…)

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I really enjoy the consistency the Hearthware Gourmet coffee roaster affords to darker roasts — those that live somewhere on the other side of second crack. I have, however, been underwhelmed by its performance on the lighter side of the roast spectrum — time and again my City roasts –more specifically, everything on the near side of second crack — have cupped with muted flavors, even the brightest of coffees [yeah, even Kenyans] show very little liveliness in the cup, especially when compared to the very bright flavors brought out by the Freshroast roaster.

These two roasters, the Hearthware Gourmet and the Freshbeans Freshroast, each go about their business in a decidedly different manner. Sure, they’re both hot-air roasters. But their methods are very different. Today we’ll examine the Freshbeans Freshroast in some depth…

The Freshroast employs a fairly simple glass cylinder as a roast chamber. Hot air is jetted up from the bottom of the chamber, and the green coffee burbles up and tumbles down inside that narrow glass chimney. As any given bean roasts it becomes drier, and lighter, and so it rises up the column while greener and more dense beans fall.

This method has some inherent issues. The roast chamber is far warmer at the bottom, where the air jets in. It’s possible for beans to become trapped at the bottom of the cylinder –exposed to direct heat– so the temperature has to be strictly managed… especially given the very small roast chamber. Perhaps to compensate, the Freshroast is designed to shut off its heating element at 450 degrees F, restoring the heat again only when the temperature falls below 425 degrees F.

This results in a rather odd-looking temperature profile: a fairly linear temperature progression from room-temperature to 450 degrees F, and then a wavy line that can swell as much as 50 degrees between 400 F and 450 F, depending on the temperature of the bean mass itself. This, as you might imagine, can play havoc with your coffee beans. Those beans just on the cusp of releasing their heat energy in the burst that signals first crack suddenly lose momentum –they won’t go exothermic until the next upswing in the temperature.

The net effect: first crack [and second, for that matter] is inconsistent, both in terms of onset and duration — it may begin as soon as 90 seconds into the roast, and may continue for another three minutes!

Happily enough, it works. And it may be precisely because of the peculiar manner in which it works that coffee roasted in the Freshroast finishes with a particularly complex flavor — a single roast yields a wide range of individually roasted beans, from those that just hit first crack, to those that are nearing second.

Stay tuned… we’ll look at the Gourmet next.

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