Roasting is what we do! It’s what makes your coffee so damn good!
But, here’s the real question. How does roasting actually work?
It’s actually a pretty simple process that involves gas, heat, and lots of green coffee beans! Green coffee beans are the bean before being roasted. They tend to be smaller, weigh heavier, and have unique flavors to them based on where they’re from!
Placing the beans in a drum roaster such as our San Francisco roaster and using a propane tank to get a fire under the roaster to heat up the beans! It gets HOT! Roasting beans at around 450 degrees!
You need to make sure once you drop the beans in you know what you’re doing so you don’t burn your beans! The drum spins the beans around over the heat to roast the beans evenly! The temperature needs to be careful so you don’t take years to roast or that it’s too high you burn them!
During the roasting process the beans lose some water causing them to be lighter and inflate anywhere from 50% to 100% in size!
The fun part about roasting is deciding what roast type you want; Light roast, medium roast, and dark roast!
As you would expect the longer you keep the beans in the roaster the darker the roast will be! This also changes the flavor profile based on how long you roast it!
For example in order for us to get the correct flavors of our Costa Rican coffee it has to be roasted to medium! If it goes over or under that the flavors won’t be right and the coffee wouldn’t be as good!
During the roasting you need to take beans out of the tester every so often to make sure you have the correct flavors and roast!
Once you find the correct flavors you want you lower the temperature to finish the beans off and then you drop them in the cooling bin!
The cooling bin has air holes that when spinning cool the beans down and mixes the beans if wanting to make a blend roast!
Once the beans have cooled enough you drop the beans into whatever you want! That could be food grade bins, coffee bags, or anything you want!
Getting to learn how to roast some coffee myself has been a very fun learning experience and want to learn more! I hope this has been a fun learning experience for you on how you get your damn good coffee!
Drink Coffee. Work Hard.
Josh