We're ready to move from the coffee growers to the coffee roasters! In this post, I'll teach you how coffee is roasted after it is shipped from the bean producers. In the next post, we'll go over the different roasts, and you'll be able to decide which one sounds like the best one for you!
Roasting allows the coffee bean to become the dark brown that we're all used to grinding and enjoying. It also allows the bean to gain that glorious flavor we've grown to love (and depend on). Roasting may be done at home, but this blog is dedicated to the professional preparation of coffee beans. Later, however, we will be analyzing at-home methods of preparing coffee.
Professional roasting involves cleaning the shipment of beans, roasting them, cooling them, and packaging them. Occasionally, grinding before packaging could be included in this process, but I'm choosing to disregard this step in favor of at-home grinding for quality purposes.
Cleaning the beans is comparable to searching for gold in a river. The beans are dumped onto a screen and heartily shaken to remove any additional debris left over after they were harvested. They are then weighed and transferred to the roasting area. Roasters are usually heated up to as high as 540 degrees, or as low as 370 degrees. The roasting process takes up to 30 minutes, depending on the temperature and how dark the roasters would like the bean to be.
Here is a picture of a roaster:
Roasters are made to continuously move the coffee beans around in the heated vat so that they may all be evenly heated. The longer the coffee is roasted, the less the beans retain their original flavor. The darkest beans lose almost all flavor, and are left with the smoky, harsh flavor left by the roasting process.
Roasting may be accomplished through direct and indirect firing. This means that the beans either come into contact with flame, or they only come into contact with extreme heat from a flame on the other side of the closed surface they are roasting on. It may be concluded from the styles of these roasting methods, that the direct firing method uses much more heat, and thus a much darker roast in a shorter time, than the indirect firing method.
After the beans are roasted, they are cooled in a chamber infused with cool air. This is the final step before they are packaged and sent off to be sold.
The different types of roasts come with each of their own unique set of attributes. This means that there is one type of roast that leads to the perfect cup of coffee, but there is that one type of roast that will lead you to your own perfect cup of coffee. Stay tuned for the next post, because we'll go over what flavors each roast produces and where you can find them at your favorite Maryland coffee roaster!
No comments:
Post a Comment