Dec 14 Roasting Coffee

Alright, I admit it. I roasted coffee this morning. I was out of coffee and I didn't feel like braving the weather to go to a coffee shop, but I had some green beans stashed away in the freezer, so I got them out.

My setup wasn't elaborate, just a frying pan on the stove with a lid (and the exhaust fan going, of course).  I heated up the pan, dumped in the beans, put the lid on, and started shaking over the burner. Once it was a little past the first crack stage, I took off the lid so I could see what I was doing. Somewhere shy of a Vienna roast I took it off the stove, threw the beans in a strainer, blew off the chaff, and let them cool down.

By any normal measurement, my roast was not particularly good. The beans were not evenly roasted. Some were lighter than others. Some were even roasted more on one side than another. But, on the other hand, I got all the beans past the first crack stage and none of them were burnt or charred. And the result was a very satisfying cup of coffee.

Given than I'd just returned from the land of Nescafé (which is not as terrible as you might imagine), that might not seem like a very high bar, but it was also much better than the god-awful half pound of coffee from Ritual that I'd been suffering through the previous week. That's not to say my roast was better than Ritual's, but theirs was a very light roast. I don't care for light roast coffee. I'm sure it was the perfect roast to highlight all of the citrus and floral notes in the particular varietal I'd happened to pick up. And that would be great if I were drinking a cup of herbal tea, but in a cup of coffee I find it very unsatisfying. On the other hand it was satisfying to be able to roast the cup of coffee myself that I personally found more pleasurable than the one I had been drinking from a well-known roaster.