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COFFEE roasting is the culinary art of applying heat to green coffee beans in order to develop their flavor before grinding and brewing. The entire process is highly complex, but this brief guide should give you a helpful overview — as well as something to consider the next time you sit down to enjoy a cup of joe.
Factors of flavor: According to food chemists, roasted coffee has one of the most complicated flavor profiles of all foods and beverages with over eight hundred substances contributing. Many factors influence the taste of the coffee you drink. Coffee beans grown in different microclimates of the world, for example, will display vastly different characteristics with flavors that may range from deep notes of chocolate to bright overtones of lemon.
Botany also plays a role. Coffee comes from a plant (genus Coffea) with ninety different species. Only two of those species (Coffea arabica and Coffea robusta) are primarily grown as cash crops, but different varietals (or cultivars) within those species are cultivated all over the world. Kona, Geisha, Blue Mountain, and Bourbon are just four examples of the many Arabica varietals.
Finally, the journey coffee takes from the seed to your cup will also influence its flavor. Let’s begin our coffee trek with...
The coffee cherry: Your cup of joe begins its life as a seed or pit within the fruit or “cherry” on a coffee plant. (The coffee plant is often called a tree but is really a shrub.) The cherries on the coffee plant will ripen from green to yellow to red. They are then picked, either by hand or machine.
The coffee bean: Each coffee cherry contains two green coffee beans, which grow with their flat sides facing each other. The exception is the coffee cherry that contains a “peaberry,” which is a single, rounded seed. (The peaberry is rarer and for a variety or reasons considered to be of better quality than regular coffee beans.) Once coffee is picked, it must be “processed” as soon as possible to prevent spoilage.
Processing: Most coffee drinkers never consider this un-glamorous step in the seed-to-cup journey, but how coffee is processed can greatly affect its final flavor. Before the hard green coffee beans can be roasted (which will turn them brown), they must be extracted from the skin and pulp (or flesh) of the fruit surrounding them. This is usually done by a dry, wet, or semidry processing method.
Dry, natural, or unwashed processing: This method of processing coffee is the oldest and is still used in many countries where water resources are limited. After the cherries are picked, they are spread out to dry in the sun for several weeks. The outer layer of dried skin and pulp is then stripped away, usually by machine. This method is used in Ethiopia, Brazil, Haiti, Paraguay, India, and Ecuador. Because these beans are dried while still in contact with the coffee fruit, they tend to have more exotic flavor profiles than wet processed coffee. They often display more fruity or floral characteristics, for example, and are heavier in body.
Wet or washed processing: Special equipment and large quantities of water are needed to execute this processing method, which gradually strips away the layers of soft fruit that surround the hard coffee beans. The beans are then dried in the sun or machine dried in large tumblers. This processing method, used in major Latin American coffee-growing countries (except Brazil), produces more consistent, cleaner, and brighter flavored coffees than the dry method.
Semidry or pulped processing: This method is a kind of combo of both. Water is used to remove the skin of the fruit but not the pulp (or flesh), which is left on and allowed to dry on the bean. After it is dried, the pulp is removed by machine. This method, which is used in Brazil and (a variation of it) in Indonesia, produces coffee that has the fruity and floral notes of dry processing with the clarity of wet processing.
Home roasting: After green coffee is fully processed, it is ready for roasting. Until the early twentieth century, coffee was primarily roasted in the home, over fires or on stoves, using pans or a hand-turned drum appliance. In the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries, stores and cafés also used small “shop roasters” (also called micro-roasters) to roast fresh coffee for their customers.
As the twentieth century progressed, however, coffee roasting became a major commercial endeavor. Preground, packaged coffee roasted in factories overwhelmed the market. Home roasting disappeared along with most small shop roasters until late in the twentieth century when coffee drinkers rediscovered the superior quality of freshly roasted coffee. Now the United States and other industrialized countries are enjoying a Renaissance of “small batch” or “boutique” roasting.
These days, a variety of small appliances are available that allow you to roast your own green coffee at home. To learn more, visit the Sweet Maria Web site, which sells home roasting equipment, green beans, and includes information for the home roasting enthusiast: www.sweetmarias.com. Kenneth Davids’s excellent book Home Coffee Roasting is another great resource.
Given all of the factors that can influence a coffee’s flavor, roasting has the greatest impact. As Clare well knew from her Village Blend roasting room, “The right kiss of heat would bring out the absolute best flavors in these green beans — and the wrong would destroy them forever.”
The roasting itself goes relatively quickly, 11 to 18 minutes. Here is a short list of very basic steps that should give you a general overview of a typical small-batch roasting process.
Stage 1 — Raw Green Coffee: The green, grassy-smelling beans are released from the roaster’s hopper into its large drum. The drum continually turns the beans to keep them from scorching. As the beans dry and cook, they start to turn yellow to yellow-orange in color and give off aromas like toasted bread, popcorn, or buttery vegetables.
Stage 2 — Light, Cinnamon, New England-Style: As they continue to roast, sugars start to caramelize and the beans begin to smell more like roasting coffee. At around 400°F, the small, hard green bean doubles in size, becomes a light brown color, and gives off a popping or cracking sound, which is why this stage is called “the first crack” stage. What the master roaster is seeing now is the change in the chemical composition of the bean. (The process is called pyrolysis and it includes a release of carbon dioxide.) The acidity or “bright” notes in this coffee will be powerful, and its unique characteristics (based on the origin and processing of the beans) will be pronounced, but the body will be pretty thin. The surface of the light brown bean will be dry because the flavor oils are still inside.
Stage 3 — Light-Medium, American Style: The temperature rises to about 415°F and the color of the bean changes from light brown to medium brown. The acidity or “bright” notes are still there but not as strong. The characteristics of the varietals will still be pronounced but the body will be fuller. For residents of the East Coast of America, this is the traditional roasting style.
Stage 4 — Medium, City: The temperature rises from 415° to 435°F and the color of the bean is a slightly darker medium brown. The subtle flavor notes in the varietals are not as strong but still quite clear, the acidity or “brightness” is still present, and the body is even fuller. This is the traditional style for the American West.