The Art of Coffee Roasting...

Dancing

As coffee roasts there are two things that happen.

1.  The moisture cooks off

2.  The sugars in the beans caramelize

The art is to cook the beans raw enough to leave the natural God given flavor but cooked well enough that those caramelized sugars do a tango on your tongue.

Did you know that I can make green coffee beans dance?

The Art in Roasting

Indian Monsooned Malabar - Roasted 

Have you ever Googled for images of roasted coffee beans?  If you have then you have seen the many images of coffee beans with a uniform color.  This uniformity is indicative of a mechanical roast which is scientifically heated, timed and cooled.  Not so with my roasts.  My roasts are not uniform because the process I use to roast is not at all scientific - it's artistic.


When you go to Target, Kohl's, K-Mart, or Walmart to buy art, what you are actually getting is a mass produced image of something that may have been art at one time - but no longer.  Real art is what you get when you go to Sotheby's.


Take the image above for example (click the image for a larger version).  Highlighted by the yellow star is a lighter bean.  The lighter beans retain the intrinsic flavor of the bean itself.  In this bean is an awesome flavor that is only found in the soil of the Malabar region of India.  It is wet-processed leaving the fruit of the coffee berry to dry onto the coffee bean itself until it naturally flakes away.  Then, the bean retains the natural flavor of the environment of that region of the world because it has been cured for about a year through the monsoon season which wet and dried and wet and dried and wet and dried this bean.  Yes, it took time but the flavor is wonderful because of it.


Now notice the bean toward the top in the blue star.  This bean is very dark and oily, it has the strong flavor of the roasting process.  The moisture is all gone out of this bean and the sugars caramelized under the heat to create a great roasted flavor.  If you will notice the bean in the purple star, this also is a dark roasted bean and if you will notice a rough patch on the bean, this shows that the bean was taken well into what is called the Second-Crack, a stage of the roasting process that tells me when to stop roasting (any darker and I would begin to make charcoal).


So there you have it, my Monet, my Van Gogh, my Dali!  The piece that you see above is originally mine and it will never be duplicated - it is a one of a kind and this specific one is being shipped to soldiers stationed in Afghanistan.  


Thank you to those who serve! I hope this little piece of art brings you as much joy as I had creating it. 

Idiot Proof Coffee? A Rant of the Righteous...

I feel like somebody entered the Musée du Louvre and desecrated the Mona Lisa with a mustache. I feel violated, like that time when Coca-Cola changed to the New Formula or when I learned that Santa Claus was not real. Today, my world is sad because the art of coffee has been reduced to a meaningless mechanical process. I am usually quite supportive of technology but this time the technicians have gone too far!

I went into the local grocer last night to pick something up for dinner and I noticed a group of people gathering around a vendor who was giving away something for free. Mmmmmm, so I got in line. The vendor was giving away free cups of coffee. Mmmmmmm, I waited. When I got closer I learned that they were promoting a coffee maker that used coffee discs. It's called the Tassimo Brewer and it claims to brew the perfect cup.

I read a review of the disk/pod coffee brewing system and the writer said that brewing coffee this way was "idiot proof". Ooooooooo, that makes me so mad - if idiots want something hot to drink let them stick with tea! The perfect cup of coffee is supposed to be sought after like Indiana Jones seeking after a relic, Bobby Fisher seeking to win the Chess championship from the Russians, the Detroit Lions seeking the Superbowl. The power of creating a perfect cup of coffee is not supposed to be given to just anyone who can afford to buy the machine, that's like giving a nuke to terrorists just because they can afford it.

Ach, this is a sad day indeed. What's next for coffee? Will they design a Terminator that will excrete coffee from its bladder?