Shop roasting: Roasting with an audience.

  
Last week our roaster malfunctioned (again!), and I had to go out of the shop to roast. Solberg & Hansen were nice enough to let us use their UG22 Probat roaster. Thank you S&H! They are a medium scale roaster and naturally don’t roast their coffee in a coffeebar as we do. The whole experience taught me a lot about several things. 

First of all that it’s easy to get used to roasting with logs and several temperature probes. The UG22 had only one analogue thermometer at the exhaust, whilst our roaster has two digital thermometers (one bean pile thermometer and one exhaust). At S&H I had to rely a whole lot more on sight and smell and the knowledge of the development of the beans I’ve managed to pick up so far. I’m not going to pretend that it all went like a breeze, but I was surprised over how well it turned out.

This leads me on to the next thing I learned while roasting at S&H: It’s easier to roast without people constantly disturbing you to ask what you are doing. This seems pretty obvious, but after roasting in the shop for a while I have gotten used to it. Looking back now however I realize that one has to be a lot more focused when roasting with an audience. I’ve lost count over how many times I’ve had to tell customers that I’m NOT grinding beans, nor brewing coffee in that giant metal thing, I’m actually roasting coffee. There is no doubt that the roaster draws attention to itself and I feel that for every person realizing what I’m actually doing there is one more person enjoying their cup of coffee just a little bit more. So I’ve found my place as not only a roaster but also a teacher of basic coffee knowledge. I dear to claim that shop roasters are the frontline soldiers of specialty coffee. (Anyone disagree with this?) 

Photo taken by Chris Kolbu (and used without permission… Sorry Chris.)

Are you making coffe on autopilot?

Let’s face it. There is no shortage on opinions on the internet about how to make the best coffee. And quite a few has, in their own mind, come up with the perfect routine.

In this post I’m not after finding my own perfect way, nor am I particularly experimental, but what sparked me to write this was a first hand experience on how a seemingly perfect routine can be deceiving. As the parameters surrounding the brewing process changes, such as new coffees, different roasts and so on, this will affect the brewing.

We realized that we hadn’t checked for a while about what brew time and grinder setting was optimal for the current freshness of our coffee when making french press coffee. We’ve also been switching back and forth between two different grinders (same make but different models) but keeping the same grinder setting. We then decided that we had to check if what we were doing were correct.

To make a long story short: We kept the grinder setting, but varied the brew time.

We brewed several french presses at once, but let them brew for different lengths (4, 4.5, 5 and 5.5 minutes) and cupped the coffees blind. We used a Kenyan coffee (Eeagads Estate) with a very distinct blackcurrant flavour.

We ended up deciding to let the coffee brew for 5 minutes as opposed to the 4 minute brew we have been using up until now. Originally we had decided that 4 minutes of brewtime were perfect for this coffee, but since then some parameters have changed without us adjusting our routine accordingly.

This discovery led me to think of how many other coffee bars and roasters must be doing the same thing without realizing that things maybe should change.

Have you tested your own routine recently? Be it roasting a certain coffee to a certain colorette or agtron degree or brewing an espresso on one temperature setting with the coffee coming in almost certainly being roasted to slightly different degrees.

Personally I feel comfortable that we check our own routine and coffees regularly but this was still an eye opener. We roast our own coffee and know when we need to adjust the brew temeperature slightly to accommodate slight variations in the roast degree. But what about coffee bars that don’t roast their own coffee. Do they test to see if their new batch of coffee needs an adjustment of their routines?

Is it perhaps time to see if you’re making the most out of your coffee or if you’re just making coffee on autopilot?

Just a thought.

Cross contamination! Is your cupping routine up to scratch?

After our previous experiment with unripes we got a comment suggesting that the lack of a clear result might be due to cross contamination of the coffees. Even though we feel we have a good cupping routine, cleaning the spoons between each cup and so forth, we thought it might be interesting to check for ourselves what the effect of a really bad cross contamination would be and if our current cupping procedure is up to scratch.

For those of you who don’t know what a cross contamination is I’ll try to explain: Imagine that on a cupping table you have several cups of coffee and one of these contains a stinker bean or another defect which is really apparent. During the cupping process some bozo isn’t cleaning his spoon between each cup, or that during the breaking of the cups that same clown is just going from cup to cup breaking the crust without rinsing the spoon in between. This can lead to the taste of that defect being brought to the other cups and consequently affecting their taste. There are several other scenarios where you might get cross contamination, but this was just an example.

So to our experiment:

We found the worst defect we could come across, which in this case was a really past-crop Harrar from Ethiopia we’ve been using to roast. We picked the worst looking beans of them all and put them in a cup.

We then picked two coffees we know are nice and clean. A Kenyan coffee from Eeagads Estate and a Rwandan coffee from Bukonya Estate.

We set up three groups of the two coffees. One to be thoroughly cross contaminated with the defect cup, one being treated to our normal cupping routine and one not being cupped with the defect cup at all. The three groups were cupped with different spoons cleaned in seperate cups to make absolutely sure there were no cross contamination between the groups.

The defect beans were ground last to make sure that no cross contamination occured in the grinding process.

Then we started cupping. One by one we tasted Bukonya from the first group, the Bukonya from the second group and from the third. Then we did the same with the Eeagads. We were four people cupping but I wont mention the names save to say it was the usual suspects. (We had another comment saying that mentioning who the people cupping were might influence how the readers would interpret the results.)

The overall conclusion was that even though we over contaminated the first group, the defect wasn’t as apparent as one might expect. The second and third group (the control group) dispalyed no apparent differences thus proving that our normal cupping procedure is thorough enough and doesn’t produce cross contamination.

What we found interesting though was the low degree of defect taste in our overly cross contaminated group. The cup with defected beans tasted really horrid of ferment and unripe beans, but very little of this taste made it over to the cross contaminated cup. We found this strenghtening the concusion of our last experiment that the actual type of defect (say a stinker) has a lot more to say with whether or not it stands out (and cross contaminates) than it just being a nasty tasting bean. We also feel it strengthens the theory that cross contamination between two “fresh” coffees will be hard to taste.

All this being said, we feel strongly that for hygenic reasons it’s important to have a quite strict regime, and it also helps ruling out all eventualities when production cupping.