I have always loved good coffee, though my preference over the years has
been towards a darker roast. Well, the folks at the Bull Run coffee bar in
the new Rustica Bakery location served me some fabulous, lightly roasted
Ethiopian Beloya, brewed through their Siphon. Wow – flavor notes in the
coffee that I never knew existed! The process of brewing through the
Siphon, by the way, is almost a piece of performance art – highly
recommended just for the fun of watching, as well as the delight of drinking
afterwards! Then during my next visit a week or so later, I had some
Dogwood Espresso. Again, not overly roasted, and the flavor was amazing.
What’s the deal here? I never used to enjoy lighter roasts! So, I did some
research. It turns out that, as you progress towards a darker roast, the
original character of the bean is overtaken by the flavor of the roast. Now
this may be a good thing, if the beans you start with are good but perhaps
not great.
Well, Ethiopian Beloya is a great bean. And Dogwood is a great blend. The
folks at Bull Run have figured out what the best roast profile is for each
of them, and presumably for their other varieties as well.
But, I got to thinking, what if my tastes were different from theirs? What
if I’d prefer my beans just a tad darker, or a bit lighter? And the beans
themselves, once roasted, have a relatively limited shelf life (which is why
Bull Run tries to roast just before they sell their beans) whereas green
beans can sit around for a year or more. I was now intrigued by the whole
notion of roasting. More research: turns out that it’s not that hard to
roast your own beans!
To make an already long story only slightly shorter, the folks at Bull Run
have looked into home roasters, and they decided to sell one – the Gene Café
Home Roaster. And, well, I, er, bought one.
Now, if you go out on the web, you see all sorts of references to roasting
profiles, times and temperatures for different beans. Some folks suggest
that you pre-warm the roasting chamber (but don’t burn yourself!). You need
to listen for the “first crack,” you should pay attention to the roast smell
of the exhausted air, look at the bean color, watch out for chaff fires and,
above all, DON’T SCREW UP!
Um. Time to step back. The Gene Café is basically an overgrown hot air
popcorn popper. Relax. You get a bunch of green coffee when you purchase
the roaster, so don’t worry about it if you actually do screw up a batch or
two.
There are a few things to consider. First, don’t roast in the house unless
you live alone, have the worlds most tolerant spouse or roommate, or the
world’s most powerful exhaust fan. It’s winter at the moment, so I roast in
the garage. It makes the garage smell very good for the next day!
Now, it will probably work perfectly well to just set the machine at its top
temp (482oF), set the timer for something like 15 minutes, and enjoy
watching the beans roast. I liked the idea of pre-warming things to try and
remove any variability based on room temperature (cold garage in winter
versus warm patio in summer). So, this is what I did for my first roast,
using Bonkawan Coop beans from Sumatra:
- weigh out 220 grams of green beans (so you need a scale)
- put the beans in the roasting chamber, and turn the Gene Café on
- set the temperature to 300, and the timer to 24 minutes (this is the pre-warming step)
- hit ’start,’ and watch the beans turn ’round and ’round in the chamber
- at 20 minutes on the timer (so the beans have been warming for 4 minutes),
turn the temperature up to 482F. Let the roasting begin!
- Watch the beans slowly darken. Smell the exhaust – the scent
changes from a ‘green’ smell to some scents of roast
- I think I heard 1st crack at 10 minutes (so 10 minutes of roasting)
- Hit ‘cool’ at 9 minutes
It takes about 8 minutes for the roaster to go through its cooling cycle,
and during the first few minutes the beans are still probably roasting a
bit. So, you want to stop the roast while the beans a bit lighter than you
want. I really didn’t know what I wanted, but this was a great place to
start.
Once the cooling cycle is done, pour the beans into a colander. I use 2
colanders, pouring the beans back and forth to remove the chaff. Now, about
those chaff fires – prevent them by cleaning out the chaff trap.
And that’s it. There are lots of variables, lots of ways to tinker with the
roast, but the basic idea is really pretty simple. In fact, I am finding
that it’s easier to make a good roast than it is to make a good espresso!
Author: Jon Peterson (Bull Run customer)
Photo by: Jon Peterson
