“How to Roast” Hosted by Edible Brooklyn & Brooklyn Brewery

It has been one month since our demonstration on how to roast coffee at home has happened.  Here’s a recap:

Since we have a good amount of experience roasting on a production roaster on a daily basis, we wanted to find the best approach to excite people into trying to do some roasting at home with tools that would be readily available.  Coffee is fun & brings people together and on that Wednesday night the people came out in droves.  The room was packed with eager self-proclaimed “coffee geeks” hungry to get started on a new adventure.  In preparation we roasted on an 8 inch heavy frying pan, 4 inch sauce pan, & and I-Roast home roaster.  These items had a price tag ranging from a few dollars to over $200.  We wanted to stress the point that anyone with an interest, time, and patience be creative in their kitchen

We covered:

Price of home equipment, how to source some green coffee (Sweet Maria’s is a great one), and the basic principals of roasting. Since time and temperature, and where these two meet on a profile or x y grid, are critical in getting coffee to a desired quality that is reflected in the cup, we chose to use the I-Roast2 in our demonstration.  The iRoast2, a fluid bed or “air” roaster gives the pilot some controls in terms of setting temperatures at certain times. It also progressed in a respectable amount of time: in the 15-minute range, which also mirrors the length of a typical production roast.

What we did:

We took our Pedra Roxa, Brazil coffee through a 15-minute roast, trying to best mirror our production roast. We mapped out the coffee progression by capturing the coffee from the production roaster at 1.5-minute intervals. What it revealed is the fast progression towards the end, where the beans begin to exotherm and really start to develop quickly. Watching carefully later in the roast is paramount to attaining the kind of notes you want to bring out in the given. That is where real changes happen and where you can go from grassy, vegetal, wheat notes to the more desired sweet notes such as baker’s chocolate and white peach.