Sunday, September 20, 2009

Yesterday's coffee roast

I ordered a couple of different types of green coffee beans from SweetMaria's recently. It's a very good source for home coffee roasting. This is the first time I've ordered beans from them, my favorite is HulaDaddy, you can get green Kona beans straight from the farm in Hawaii. This recent order was for Ethiopia Moplaco Yirga Cheffe and Colombia "Platos Fuertes de Huila" MicroLot Mix. I've tried African coffees in the past and found it too "earthy" for my taste. I later found that the "earthiness" comes from dry processing and that I might prefer a water processed bean. Sweetmarias had rave reviews for this Ethiopian, especially if it's roasted to a City Roast, which is my favorite. I roast on my gas grill with a custom drum that's attached to a rotisserie, it can handle 1lb of beans. I decided to try something new to roast the Ethiopian, I normally roast with only the front and rear burners on medium. This time I left all three burners on full blast. This turned out to be the perfect temperature, the first crack came at around 12 minutes. I let it continue just until I heard the beginning of the second crack, then quickly poured the beans into a colander to cool. I pour the beans from one colander to another in front of a fan, cools down and blows off the chaff. I wasn't able to get every little bit of chaff off but no problem, it didn't affect the flavor of the coffee. After leaving it uncovered overnight, lets off excess CO2, I ground some this morning and made a pot of some of the best coffee yet!
I was a little worried at first, the beans were of varying sizes which can lead to inconsistent roasting. I took a photo of some of the various sizes after the roast. It didn't seem to matter, it tasted great.

2 comments:

  1. Well hello Tom Jones, may this old lady welcome you to blogland? I could almost smell the coffee beans roasting, so that was very descriptive. I cannot get on your follower list as it keeps saying they cannot fill my request at this time. I have forgotten how to delete the cookies.
    QMM

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  2. This roast yielded some of the best coffee I have ever had. I will be buying more!

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