3 ways to increase coffee sweetness while roasting

one of the challenges home coffee roasters have is crafting coffee so they have sweetness in their cup many times we end up with a bitter cup and so today our focus is going to be on three different ways that we can increase sweetness while roasting coffee stick around all right thanks for joining me today and welcome to the virtual coffee lab i get this question all the time mike how do i get a sweeter cup of coffee how do i roast my coffee so that i can highlight some of the sweetness or i seem to have more bitter notes or tart notes in my cup and i'm trying to figure out how to draw the sweetness out of this coffee and even some of the questions like gosh my coffee tastes like kind of papery or flat and i don't seem to be able to get the sweetness out of my cup what should i do so we're going to be talking about that today and i've identified really three main areas that are going to help us get a sweeter cup of coffee while roasting it so let's get started all right the first one is processing so when we talk about processing i'm talking about the coffee the cherry after it's been picked off of the shrub goes through a processing at the mill and it may be a washed process where the berry is crushed the seed is pushed out of the flesh of the cherry and it's washed soaked and washed and then laid out to dry that is a washed processed coffee the bean is washed a dry processed coffee is where they pick the cherry off of the shrub it then dries out on a bed with the seed still inside of the cherry for a number of days and then the sea is removed and it's not necessarily washed in any sort of a way to clean off uh the fruit and so you actually have a film the mucilage that's left on the bean and sometimes even a little bit of fleshiness but mostly mucilage that film and that's where we get our dry processed coffee from so by just by default dry processed coffees tend to be potentially more sweet than a washed coffee this is an important point because really what we're talking about within the molecules of the coffee itself we're talking about fructose and sucrose are two elements that i'm identifying at least in this talk here and with fructose that is prevalent with a dry processed coffee in the mucilage so you're going to have a higher level of fructose on a dry processed coffee than you will on a wash coffee the sucrose element of the the sugars is the same if it's the same coffee and just a different process that really isn't impacted by the process itself so a dry processed coffee generally speaking is going to have more of an opportunity for sweet notes in your coffee when you roast it all right so next is density this is really interesting because in doing my research i was looking and there were some different scientific articles about coffee sweetness and what makes coffee sweet and they highlighted these different coffees and they were talking about the different sweetness but what they didn't talk about was density and density is going to have an impact on sweetness now their point wasn't necessarily to determine all the ways that coffee sweetness arises it was more talking specifically about the process but density does have a significant impact on the level of sweetness in a coffee and that's because at higher altitudes coffee grows slower and the molecules the actual molecular structure of the seed is more dense it's more tight and so there are more molecules it grows slower matures slower and so we have more sugar molecules in a higher density coffee than we would in a low density coffee so if you're looking for you know coffees that have more sweetness you want to look for a high density coffee higher altitude coffee all right and the third way that we can maximize sweetness in our cup while roasting coffee is through our roasting profile that is the total roast time and the time within each of the three phases of coffee roasting the dry phase the browning phase and the development phase if you're not sure what i'm talking about i've got a playlist you can check out up here that has all of the basics that talks about all of that and the three tips for new home coffee roasters video that leads off that playlist is probably the one you should start with and it'll really be helpful for you to understand that but in applying that practice and applying that concept of roasting you are able to maximize your sweetness in your coffee while roasting it and here's how we're gonna do it i'm gonna break it down a little bit but i would highly recommend you check out that playlist one of the videos in that playlist talks about how to roast sweet and flavorful coffee and there we talk about carmelization and we talk about chemical reactions or molecular reactions known as the miard reactions and these create the complexity of the coffee and so this middle phase and the development phase is really important for flavor development and we want to be able to one give enough time for the flavor development to take place during the browning phase and the development phase if we're roasting our coffee and we're just applying heat and we're rushing towards first crack then we're moving too quickly through that middle phase and we will not get a lot of the complexity and we won't allow a lot of those flavors to develop and if we push it too hard we even risk underdeveloped coffee coffee that hasn't been roasted all the way through to the inside and we experienced vegetable flavor notes and even metallic notes in our coffee and we don't want that at all we want to make sure that we get enough time within the brown phase to be able to allow these reactions to take place and then the caramelization is going to be taking place then and through development we don't want to rush it but we don't want to extend it we don't want to extend the browning phase too long either because then we start to mute these reactions and also the carmelization if we go too long in development then we get past the point of maximum sweetness and we start to mute or that sweetness that caramelization that's taken place starts to go in towards bitter notes and so we don't want to do that either so the length of time that we spend in these two phases is really important and is going to have great impact on the end cup and the sweetness in the cup this is a really important point because that's why understanding the three phases of roasting coffee is so important because we have this total roast time that we're dealing with let's just say you're on an air roaster and your total roast time is seven minutes you're going to want to have a certain amount of that percentage of that time be devoted towards the browning phase and then first crack hits and then a certain amount of time that's going to be devoted towards the development phase before you drop the coffee so understanding the timing of all that is really going to be helpful and you'll be surprised if you start to move some of those times around how much time you're spending in those phases you'll find that you can have the same coffee with a different result based on how much time you're devoting towards each of those phases it's really interesting and again rob huss's book that's what he experiments with he goes through and he makes subtle changes in temperature over time and it does impact the flavor notes of the coffee where you'll have something that might taste like a real bright tangerine but then with a couple of changes a little more time extended in the middle phase all of a sudden you start to get these darker notes like a bergamot type of an orange that will it's all in the same coffee with just because you've extended the time of the middle face by 30 seconds or 15 seconds it can have a great impact it's also going to help us with consistency too once we start to figure out our times and our temperatures and how to apply that towards these different phases to maximize sweetness then we can practice and build on consistency so that we have a consistent charge temperature a consistent time in the dry phase a consistent time and knowing exactly the adjustments we need to make to bring our rate of rise down to slow down the roast to be able to extend the amount of time that we need within that browning phase i know there's a lot involved in this for the sweetness but the concept of giving enough time but not too much time to this middle phase is really important and the development phase is really important for those of you who roast dark that like to go dark it's really hard to get sweetness in the cup once you start to get into second crack by its nature you are destroying or you're breaking down the molecular structure of the coffee and that caramelization has already peaked and is starting to produce bitter notes in the coffee so keep that in mind i'm not trying to tell you that it's wrong or that you shouldn't do that it's all about personal preference all of these coffee notes and what our expectations are in coffee roasting are all about our own personal preferences and so the point of this video is to talk to you about how to maximize sweetness and if you enjoy those darker notes then you don't necessarily care or that's not your focus is to maximize sweetness you want some of that bitterness in the cup because you enjoy the bitterness and that's okay as well i've said a lot in this video and i hope that this information has been helpful i would be interested to hear your comments on how you maximize sweetness when you roast coffee what is it that you're doing to try to draw out the sweet notes while you roast coffee please share that with me in your comments i would love to be able to learn that there's more than one way to roast coffee and again a lot of this comes down to personal preference but there are some basic principles that will help us roast some great coffee so if your coffee is boring if your coffee always tastes kind of flat if your coffee always seems to have some bitter notes in it if you don't seem to be able to taste or get some of the flavorful notes that you were hoping to get all of those could be because you are not building your profile your roasting profile out to maximize sweetness your phases might not be such where you're allowing enough time to be able to craft or allow those complex reactions to take place or maybe you're going too long maybe you don't have enough power and you're dragging your roast out and those flavors that you've been trying to accomplish are now just getting muted and going flat because you have not moved quick enough through that phase those are all things that can impact coffee if you have experiences with that i'd love to hear that share those with me too roasting coffee at home is a great hobby but there is a learning curve and your comments help me become a better roaster and i hope that my video is helping you learn more about roasting coffee at home don't forget to check that playlist out home coffee roasting essentials that's really important there's some great information there as well leave your comments hit the like button and be sure to subscribe to this channel if you enjoy the content and want to see more thank you so much for joining me today and i hope you have a great week roasting we'll see you next time you

Channel: Virtual Coffee Lab - Home Coffee Roaster

Views: 42,265

Keywords: how to roast coffee, roasting coffee, home coffee roasting, coffee roasting, coffee roaster, coffee roasting at home, specialty coffee, coffee roasting basics, specialty coffee roasting, home coffee roasting for beginners, home coffee roasting tips, how to roast coffee beans, how to roast coffee beans at home, behmor 2000ab home coffee roaster, hive coffee roaster, 3 ways to increase coffee sweetness while roasting, how to roast sweet coffee, maillard reaction, sweet coffee

Id: UBjP6JIziLs

Length: 13min 22sec (802 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 27 2022