I'm a geek. A coffee geek.

To prove it I roasted some coffee tonight.

Now, I roast coffee 4 days a week or so at work. But it's an automated process. Measure out the beans (just a level can full, don't even have to weigh them) and dump them in the chamber, set the roast level and start it to going.

What I did tonight is light up our fireplace (Gas, and simply because our stove doesn't have a hood and roasting makes lots of smoke and I dont have a grill) and put some beans in first the popcorn popper my grandmother has for the fireplace that has probably not been used in ages and ages. It's simply a pair of bowl-shaped screens that fit onto each other with a long handle.

It took a while to get the beans to brown and they never reached a crack stage. It was also a lot of work holding that stupid thing up that long. Some beans were chared and others are barely even roasted. Not having a good distributor of heat some were directly in the flames and some weren't. The air just doesn't stay as hot as metal would. If I had a real fireplace where the wood would reduce to burning coals after a while, and a rack to hold the cage at a certian height, it might work better.

Next I put my cast-iron skillet into the fire and let it warm up. I tossed in some beans and stirred them the whole time. They reached first crack but not all at once (When you roast the beans make cracking noises at two stages of the roast and roasters use this to determin the stage in the roast cycle. In a well controled roast the beans will mostly reach 1st and 2nd cracks around the same time as the rest of the bean mass, but if you can't control the roast very well as in my case they will reach them at varying times. These two crack stages are actualy caused by different things, one is actually the bean cracking the other i forget what it is. I seem to recal one being endothermic and one being exothermic, but i dont' remember for sure.) and I carried it a while into that, but not to second crack as I tend to like lighter roasts and I already had some charring going on in the batch.

After each roast I went outside into the cool air and tossed them from one screen to the other to cool them and stop the roast.

The beans in the first batch are much less evenly than the second. There were charred beans in both batches but i expected that and picked out the offenders and threw them away. The first batch has a good bit of very lightly roasted beans that taste very green when I chew on them.

I'll have to wait to see how they brew up, though, as beans need a day or so to rest and outgas before being used. We shall see.

My next experiment will involve charcoal, a grill, and pan. I want to see if the smoke has a major affect on the brew.

I am a geek. Major geek.
- posted by Nick @ 11/04/2005 12:38:00 AM | 0 comments