Bloggle

What you notice first is how quiet it is. At 400 plus pounds of iron and brass, chrome and enameled steel, it’s quieter in operation than any of the tiny air-roasters I own.

I’m at Riley’s Coffee in Fairview Heights, Il, in the company of Barry Jarrett, the shop’s owner, roaster and torch-bearer of good beans. To the good folk of Fairview, Riley’s is a coffee shop in a busy corner of St. Clair Square — a convenient stop between Dillard’s and J.C. Penney’s department stores. To the single-minded folk of alt.coffee I am at Mecca — maybe not a singular center of compulsive pilgrimage — but certainly a focal point of devotion… Barry’s coffee is just that good.

And here I am, my hands on the controls of Barry’s Diedrich IL-7 coffee roaster. It’s a one-off… an early production model, maybe even pre-production. Call Diedrich and they’ll tell you there’s no such thing. It’s a gas-fueled, infrared-powered seven kilo roaster with its control group mounted on the left-hand side. Thus, the “L”. Of course, left-hand or right-hand has little bearing on me… I’m in a coffee-roasting happy place.

As Barry steps through the controls of the machine, two things become clear. The first is that this is a very clever piece of engineering: a single blower performs triple duty of drum convection, chaff collection and cooling. The drum itself is open-ended — at both ends — allowing not only a front-mounted sight-glass and tryer [a little piston-like scoop that’s used to snag beans from the drum for closer inspection] but also making it possible to mount an array of gadgets on the back of the roasting drum, which is precisely what Barry has done. He’s augmented the built-in environmental temperature gauge with a digital probe that captures the temperature of the beans themselves… and records this “bean mass” temperature at 10-second intervals to a portable data logger.

Now, put the clever engineering and nifty bolt-ons aside, and something else becomes clear. Beyond the engineering — maybe even in spite of it — roasting coffee in Barry’s shop is very much a hands-on affair. Measuring, loading, listening… [it’s a while to first crack] and then shifting the blower like a formula-one car, listening… [it’s not so far to second] and shifting again, working the tryer, listening, sniffing, eyeing the beans, letting them sputter and crack until NOW! and dumping the beans to the cooling bin, shifting the blower one last time while the beans hiss and crackle and smoke, twirling in the bin, mahogany-brown and gleaming.

The gadgets, it turns out, are guides, only. And ultimately they say less about how you’re doing, and more about how you’ve done, and then only when you take the time to review the roast profile… studying the plot while you’re cupping a sample from that very roast. This is cupping for performance — think of the director watching dailies, or the coach studying tapes of last Sunday’s game — tasting this batch against the one before, and the hundreds before that, searching for nuances of flavor and aroma, body and finish. This is artisan’s work.

Barry would scoff, I think, if I called him a master roaster — a term that’s been so over-used in the coffee business it’s as much a pejorative. Instead, I’ll suggest simply that Barry is a craftsman — especially skilled, and always seeking to better his craft — the almost elemental melding of fire, steel… and curious beans from faraway places.

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Compared to the Freshbeans Freshroast, the Hearthware Gourmet is, by just about any measure, a cut above. Its larger capacity, its method of roasting, and its chaff collection system are superior. So why have I found it so onerous to get good results?

The Gourmet’s roast chamber is a glass globe mated to a perforated, Teflon-coated metal plate. The hot air jetted through these perforations propels the roasting coffee beans in a swirling, counter-clockwise rotation around the bottom of the roast chamber. This cyclonic action causes the roasting beans to fluidly move around the base plate, creating real roast consistency from bean to bean. The still swirling jet of air then carries the chaff that blows off the roasting beans to a stainless chaff-collector mounted to the top of the globe.

The Gourmet has a comfortably linear roast temperature profile, moving smoothly from room temperature to roasting range, and then continuing to build slowly as the bean mass heats. Unlike the Freshroast, the roast chamber temperature never drops, so roast momentum is maintained, and its power is more than adequate to bring the hardest, most dense beans to second crack and far beyond with little effort.

That power comes at a price, however… and in this case, the cost is noise. It takes a lot of wind to loft a half cup of beans, and an apparently industrial-type blower, with accompanying industrial-type volume levels. It’s a two-stage blower — the second, more powerful stage cycles in at roasting temperatures, whirling even the most stubborn beans around the globe in pulses that last about two seconds. This second stage also aids the cooling cycle, dropping the temperature of the bean mass and roast chamber in nearly the same amount of time as the Freshroast, which has far less mass to cool.

All that remains, then, is the question of why I’ve found it so challenging to achieve roasts that I like –especially those bright, full-flavored City roasts– with the Gourmet? The only answer I can offer is that my experience roasting with the Freshroast colored my expectations. I had become accustomed to the smell of the roast on the cusp of second, the color of the beans, and in particular I grew accustomed to the Freshroast’s comparatively slow conversion during first crack –as much as three minutes– and tried to apply that to the Gourmet. The smell of the roasting beans in the Gourmet is uniformly different, however, and a given bean seems to roast a bit darker [perhaps both due to the comparatively large metal base-plate].

It was only when I added a thermometer to the roasting process that I was able to better discern what was happening in each roast chamber –in particular, to note that the Gourmet’s first crack conversion takes no more than one minute, and often significantly less– and then to adjust my methods accordingly. I still try to judge as much as I can by nose, but increasingly I appreciate being able to verify by both time and temperature.

To tell the truth, the Freshroast still sits on my kitchen counter, side by side with the Gourmet. On especially tricky beans [Moka, Harar and other dry-processed, spendy African beans] I still rely on the smaller roaster — and my nose.

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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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You can tell a happy roaster by the smoke in his kitchen… I’ve been roasting a pile of beans today, each batch progressively darker [cough, cough] in an attempt to break Barry’s code. He’s coyly suggested that the roast is not so dark as it looks, and should be roasted just to the first hints of oil. We’ll see, Mr. Jarrett, we’ll see…. I’ll have a full work-up in the next day or so. The beans gotta rest, you know. Come to think of it, so do I.

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A Second Cupping of the Tarrazu Triple Play yielded notes enough for a formalized review. Formalized, in this case, means I scribbled down tick-marks and cobbled together some charts. What I don’t do is try to suggest an overall rating–a la Wine Spectator–as I’m not at all certain that coffee can be rated in such a manner, and I’m absolutely certain that I’m not the guy to do such a rating.

While I was at it, I finished the charts on this year’s St Helena, and have filed those cupping notes in the articles section as well. I have no idea how what little remains will last the rest of the year as I keep dreaming up occasions which warrant roasting some more.

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