Let's Talk Coffee Roasting!

Dear readers, this week we would like talk a little bit about coffee roasting! As some of you know, the coffee cherry is picked and then roasted before it actually makes it to the bags of coffee that you purchase from the shops. Coffee beans can be roasted in different ways such as light, medium, and dark, and the flavour of your coffee largely depends on the roasting process. “it is for the home brewer, perhaps the most important stage of the entire chain of events that takes us from farm to cup” “roasting the coffee beans.. this keenly observed and succinct process that gracefully traverses the line between science and art..” As you may be thinking, this is a very complex process that requires skill and diligence. After the coffee is picked from the farm, the roasters will buy it. Many roasters, but not all, will take into consideration the sustainability and ethics of the farm. Roasting coffee requires much skill and can very easily be messed up, this is why the roaster needs to be someone who possesses a great deal of skill. “..a bad roaster or an average roaster… can very easily corrupt even the finest specialty beans” The method of roasting a bean can change and manipulate the flavor dramatically which is why roasters will go through years of roasting and experimenting and trying different methods and styles until they come up with something that they like! “…the growing realization that coffee is enormously complex has only really cemented a feeling of acceptance as to how powerless we are to truly affect and select its attributes on a molecular scale.”  Coffee roasting can take anywhere from 7-20 minutes generally speaking, and the main idea is to generate a flavor through applying heat to the beans. The water contained in the beans will slowly start to evaporate, this is the drying process. Then the beans will become so dry that they go through a stage called first crack. Think of a snail that has become too large for its shell that it pops off! The coffee can actually be consumed at this point but depending on the roast style, the process can be continued and roasted more. The longer you leave the coffee in the roaster, the more nutty, charred, and smokey the flavor becomes. The darker roasts are often used for espresso. There is so much more to this process, but hopefully this was a helpful intro into the coffee roasting process. We hope that you feel inspired to do more research and to learn a little bit more about all that goes in to the process of having a delicious cup of coffee! 
Have a blessed weekend!
TMPC

​information sourced from The Curious Barista's Guide to Coffee by Tristan Stephenson. Published in 2019 by Cindy Richards.

image from: https://www.sabores.co.za/2019/08/13/different-coffee-roast-types/