Roast Coffee At Home Easily

if you think that roasting green coffee is some obscure art that requires elaborate machinery and years of experience stick around I'm about to prove that it requires only the simplest household tools and is almost impossible to get wrong this could be a great new hobby if you're stuck at home and your budget is stretched you can drink fine specialty coffee for the cost of plane commercial stuff and mastering it is just stupidly easy Coffee Roasting has a reputation for being difficult because commercial machines are tricky to use the design hasn't improved in over a century these Roasters eat slowly and accumulate unlike ballast which results in a lot of input while a commercial rig is unresponsive and that makes it hard to use coaxing a consistent product out of one of these monsters really is something of an art but the actual business of cooking coffee beans please people have been doing it for centuries with nothing more complicated than a hot pan and a spoon if you look around the internet for help with roasting at home you'll find two basic methods emphasizing either conduction or convection conduction causes scorching while many convection rakes are impossible to adjust on the fly I'm going to demonstrate a middle way I've developed a simple inexpensive technique that works better than either basic method with an ideal balance of about 70% convection and 30% conduction you'll need only three pieces of equipment a cooktop a fairly heavy saucepan and heat gun that's it everything else is optional you can certainly make use of a sheet pan and infrared thermometer and a stopwatch preheat the saucepan until the inside surface registers between 80 and 90 degrees Celsius or between 175 195° fair enough you wanted to stay at about that temperature if the pan gets too hot the beans will scorch when the pan is ready drop in 200 to 300 grams of green coffee beans and stir them by shaking the pan and blowing them about with a heat gun set to 350 degrees Celsius or 660 degrees Fahrenheit you are roasting coffee this is it there's nothing more just watch it and make sure there's no scorching and that the process doesn't go too fast or too slow I'll point out some milestones and rough time targets to guide you during the first couple of minutes the beans will dry and start to expand you'll notice a grassy smell they'll become lighter and easier to move with the hot air so you can shake the pan less often now between three and four minutes in the beans will darken as you reach dark yellow to light brown you'll notice a sweet bakery smell that reminds me of custard tarts in the oven sugars are caramelizing and my art compounds are being created the smell will gradually change from something like baking cookies to something more like toasted bread green coffee beans are covered with a barely visible layer called silver skin as they expand it loosens and floats away as check this is normal and nothing to worry about but remain mindful of open claims if you use an electric range and you keep it set to the right temperature the chat will never ignite if it does that's a sign that your burner is too hot between five and six minutes in you'll start to hear a crackling or snapping sound like a campfire this is a milestone called first crack these are expanding rapidly now and they're cellulose structures fracturing this will go on for a couple of minutes the beans will not make drinkable coffee until they've been through first crack once the crackling has died down you can stop and enjoy a light roast or you can continue cooking flavor development will go on many chemical reactions are happening in lots of different flavor compounds are being created you'll need to experiment to know which roast level makes this or that coffee tastes good to you but it's fun and even when you don't hit the ideal roast the coffee will almost certainly taste great as I said you really have to work this up the beans are getting darker and hotter the chemical reactions are happening faster the cooking process accelerates toward the end which makes it easy for a novice roaster to overshoot their target you can slow things down a bit by turning down the heat guns temperature setting or simply holding it a little farther from the pan but beware it's necessary for the bean temperature to increase all the time a stalled roast or one where the bean temperature falls for a period lamont be ideal there's a flavor penalty in that case so the bean temperature has to keep rising but it can do that relatively fast or slow in other words the rate of rise is variable it's a tuning knob that you can play with this is why I use a pan that's not terribly hot and why I add energy only with the heat but the pan works best when you use it to provide just enough thermal ballast to keep the roast progressing smoothly changing the pans temperature on the fly would be tricky there's a lot of lag than overshooting then more lag than undershooting and so on regulating the rate of rise is your heat guns job you can lower its temperature setting just after first crack or you can simply lift it away by a few inches so that less energy flows into the pan you can even pull it away completely and toss the beans in the pan for 10 or 15 seconds to keep them from darkening too quickly I usually slow my rate of rise about halfway through first crack roasting entirely by hand on the stove with a heat gun allows me to make constant adjustments easily and instinctively that's why this truly is the best method for home roasting I find that using a sheet pan and the heat guns blower itself cools the veins fast you should try to bring them to 50 degrees Celsius or 120 degrees Fahrenheit within four minutes of stopping the roast the veins won't offer their best flavor immediately after roasting pressure is better on a scale of weeks not days depending on the coffee variety and roast level and your method of brewing the flavor will peak somewhere between one and three weeks after roasting what happens on the far side of first crack flavor development will continue until the start of the second crack another milestone which signals the end of drinkable coffee after second crack starts the beans will become very dark and oily this is the realm of French or Italian rose as second crack goes on scorching brings overwhelming flavors created by chemical reactions that all coffee beans undergo at high temperatures that's why all scorched coffee tastes pretty much the same if you pay extra for specialty coffee with an interesting flavor then cook it until it's dark and oily you'll have wasted your money commercial beans would taste about the same how do you evaluate your roasting you should end with beans whose color is consistent I don't mean that all of the beans are the same shade as their neighbour that rarely happens due to natural variations in density and maturity rather I mean that each individual bean should be a consistent color there should be no evidence of scorching which shows as a dark area on an otherwise lighter bean here are a couple of samples one medium and one that's getting dark at both examples each bean is evenly cooked this is exactly what you want to see how do you decide when to stop judging your roast level is easy so long as you use fully washed beans and I recommend them for beginners well let me show you an example I have a medium roast on the left and a medium dark roast on the it's not so easy to tell them apart until you notice the silver skin in the center in the first example the skin is lighter relative to the beam color on the right our beans that I consider medium dark I can see the difference at a glance because the silver skins color is closer to the beans color so the contrast between the beam and the silver skin helps you to judge the roast levels again this works reliably only for washed beans honey's and Naturals have residual sugars on the surface the sugars caramelize and will throw off your judgment here are some Brazilian Naturals as you can see the silver skin is darker than the bean but not in a consistent reliable way that would let you use it as a gauge this type of bean requires an experienced eye and a practiced hand well that's all for today now go we'll order some beets and have fun in my next 2 or 3 roasting videos I'll show you how to evaluate the quality of green beans and how to overcome the challenges of working with honey's and Naturals I'll also cover the problem of matching your roast level to suit different brewing methods and different types of coffee so stay in touch Cheers

Channel: The Wired Gourmet

Views: 18,614

Keywords: wiredgourmet, thomas greene, coffee, latte, cappuccino, hario, bodum, bialetti, espresso, aeropress, chemex, mokka, brikka, brika, v60, v-60

Id: uoqdDpw0PlY

Length: 9min 39sec (579 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 25 2020