Coffee with a Side of Humble Pie
One of the deceiving elements of coffee roasting is thinking you have figured it out too quickly. Naturally, any skill takes time to perfect, but it’s hard to argue with direct results. You roast some beans, drink the coffee and if it’s good, well, you did a good job. If it’s good every time, then you are doing great…or so you may think.
I first began my journey into roasting through YouTube. Mill City Roasters published an excellent set of educational videos that really made coffee roasting a lot more approachable. One of the suggestions they made for those starting out was to sample your coffee with someone else, or better yet, with a group of people. The idea being that drinking the same coffee day-after-day will cause you to become blind to the nuances between each roast. I didn’t heed this advice and learned the more direct way.
Thinking I had the process down, I stopped being critical of my roasts and fell into a comfortable pattern of just enjoying the cup of coffee. It was only after I ventured back out to some of the local cafes that I realized my roasts were lacking any significant flavor––no sweetness, no char, just a grassy sort of taste. At the same time, I had gotten cocky and started talking about shipping my beans to friends and family. Needless to say, I had to hit the pause button and figure out where I was going wrong.
Reading through articles, roasting tips, coffee forums and more YouTube videos, I came to the conclusion that many of my roasts were underdeveloped––I was dropping the coffee to quickly and not giving the beans enough time to build up any flavor. Despite collecting hundreds of data points per roast, I neglected to actually interpret the results and map them back to roasting best practices. Step number one was writing more code to better visualize the important information I needed––temperature deltas and rate of rise for the roast.
With a more instrumented roasting platform, I went back to my process and really focused on development time and analyzing the data. 15 roasts and 6 pounds of green coffee later, I am feeling much more confident in my output and really tasting the results, not just seeing them. I’ve shipped some of my coffee out and tested with friends and family. I knew I had done a good job when I brewed my brother a cup of dry processed Sidama, Ethiopia beans and unprompted, he mentioned how it smelled and tasted of berries.
I am glad I got served some humble pie, even if it were from myself. Now that I have a much better understanding of the quality of my coffee, I am happy to begin the process of shipping more out. I’ll be working on writing the web store and targeting for more frequent shipments of coffee around April. For friend and family who have been waiting around, you’ll get some beans, don’t worry!
