The Roasting of the Beans

What is the process of roasting coffee actually like? Allow me to walk you through the steps this humble roaster follows. We are assuming the beans have already been chosen, but we don't know how to roast them yet. We read their description on a website and they sound great and they just arrived. So what do we do?

Well, how long and how hot you need to roast beans depends on a lot of things, some of them subjective. But not all of them! We need to make educated guesses as to the moisture content and density of the beans. We can get a starting point if we know the bean varietal, where the beans came from, and how long ago they came from there. An arid region will likely not produce a bean with high water content, and a low-altitude rainforest will assuredly create beans with more moisture than beans from high on a mountain. We can compare the beans to prior batches, to get a sense of how a slightly different bean might demand us to zhuzh the dials here or there.

Once we've determined those qualities of the beans, we decide on what roast level and roast duration would best accentuate the beanses' natural characteristics. Then we roasta pound of it to those specs.

What is using the roaster actually like, I pretend you ask? Well, here's what it entails:

I measure out the coffee

into a container.

I preheat the roaster

At the desired temp, I "charge" the roaster by dropping the beans from the hopper into the drum. A timer is set. Every 30 seconds, temp is recorded manually. Once the first of the roasting smells begin to emanate from the roaster we start visually monitoring bean color to get a better understanding of the rate at which they're roasting. We pay deep attention to the smells coming from the roaster. We make sure the flame is not creating too large of a differential between the inside and outside of the drum, lest we cause the metals to warp and possibly grind to a hault.

Once they start getting to around 330F smells and sounds start getting really interesting, and as soon as the first indicator of the desired roast level is reached, we slow the temperature ascent so we can help the beans average out in temperature. We don't want to do this too long, because we can start to overbake the coffee beans.

When the beans have seemed to hit the criteria we were looking for, we throw the lever to redirect airflow, turn a dial to start an arm, then we drop the beans into the cooling tray. We'll get a small air blower to begin cooling down the beans as rapidly as possible.

Then we immediately try the beans in a standard cupping procedure. Then we wait a day, and cup again. Another day or two, another cupping. Once we've seen and tasted and smelled how it changes over time we can start to find the notes from the flavor wheel that we don't want to taste and figure out how to control them. Maybe it needs less heat for more time, or more intense heat in a short burst at a specific time.

Then we try again, see if it tastes how we would like, and repeat until we have it dialed in.