Coffee.si - Everything about coffee

Coffee roasting used to be a simple process. One takes out the pan, put the pan before a flame, pour some coffee beans that are dried and watch the color turn to dark brown. One does not worry with terms like pyrolysis, the changes in chemical composition, first crack and second crack. One uses the nose from the moment the roasting coffee smells like popcorn until it smells more like coffee, turn off the heat and that’s it, roasted coffee. The best bargain is that this could be done at home.

All was well with the world until some real crack invented ways at roasting coffee beans and then there was comparison. Coffee is such a very important commodity anywhere in the world that different ways of roasting coffee followed afterwards, giving rise to the term coffee roast profiling.

Now coffee roast profiling may sound like the cloak and dagger approach to coffee roasting and in some ways it really is. When a roaster wants to bring out a particular flavor to highlight a bean’s characteristic, like the bean’s origin, its variety, the methods by which the bean will further be processed, or bring out a desired flavor, roast profiling is done.

Aside from those mentioned above, roast profiling or “recipe profiling” can be done in different ways. There are for example the indirect-fired roasters where the combustion gasses are in contact with the beans instead of the burner flames. There is also the direct-fired roaster where the flame burners are directly in contact with the beans. And then the fluidized-bed processes where the beans that are being roasted levitate on a cushion of hot air.

When the roasting cycle is finished, cooling off of the roasted coffee beans begin. This too involves different methods. One method may call for vacuum cooling. Another method is known as quenching, where fine mist of water is sprayed over the beans. And of course there is the air cooling. When the beans are cooled, de-gassing is started which is basically cooling and stabilizing the roasted coffee beans.

Basically though, coffee roasting is simply applying heat to coffee beans, altering its chemical composition. The roasting process brings out acids, aromatics and some other flavor components to create a different balance that are designed to alter the coffee’s aftertaste. Coffee roasting also desires to bring about a unique body to the coffee and this depends on the knowledge and expertise of the roaster. The roasting process, whatever the envisioned end result, basically transforms the physical properties of the green coffee beans into roasts that change the smell, density, taste and color of the coffee beans.

Having mentioned all of these, one can still roast coffee over ones own pan and not mind much about the gobbledygook that made such a simple pleasure into complicated albeit more flavor-variable preparations. After all, if at the end of the day when one can sit at the porch, raise his feet on an ottoman to be touched by the breeze and enjoy his own brew, everything is still peaceful with the world.