Just the facts, Ma’am . . . and pour me another cup while you’re at it.
How does roasting affect the coffee bean?
Roasting brings out the essence . . . the aroma, body, and flavor that is locked inside the green coffee beans. The roasting process transforms the chemical and physical properties of the beans . . . and the different degrees of roasting produce characteristic taste profiles and different amounts of caffeine.
City Roast, Full City Roast, Vienna, Espresso, Italian, New Orleans, French . . . so many different roasts! At the risk of over-generalizing . . . lighter roasts make for a brighter, more lively taste profile while darker roasts make for a sweeter, lower acidity coffee. Drinkers who prefer a low level of acidity in their brew are steered toward a darker roast . . . French roast being one of the more common choices for a low-acidity coffee. This comes with a caveat though, as many people do not like what they describe as the “burnt” or “oily” taste of a dark French roast. Perhaps French roast is an acquired taste. Or maybe people have just gotten used to buying it as they equate dark roast with a more-refined coffee choice.
You may come across those people who are misled by the misguided notion that Dark Roast is “better.” If you like dark roast, enjoy. If you don’t like a dark roast, don’t feel like a wimp. You will not be judged by the Secret Society of Coffee Snobs — not on my watch. Feel safe with this knowledge. If some French Roaster looks over his or her coffee cup at you drinking your light and lively cup of city roast, share with him or her that you prefer a brighter, higher acidity level in your coffee. You can also add that your lighter roast contains more caffeine than their French roast. This should stop any Snob from further judgment.
Of course, there are all manner and degree of roasts in between on the spectrum of light, medium, and dark. Coffee beans contain oils that include some 600 chemical substances. When the beans are roasted, the beans expand and, as a result, lose moisture. The beans’ aroma comes alive and the oils give the beans a shiny appearance – especially in the darker roasts.
A light roast (Light City, Half City, Cinnamon Roast) have a light body with a detectable acidity. This roast is often described as being “bright” or “lively.” Drinking light-roast coffee is a personal choice and should not be an invitation to judgment. All of you snobs, be nice. Coffee should be fun and others should be allowed to drink cinnamon roast without being called wimps.
Medium roasts (commonly called Breakfast Blends) are generally considered to The Middle of the Road when it comes to drinking coffee. This roast has more body than light roast beans and are more balanced in the areas of flavor, aroma, and acidity. If you don’t know what roast of coffee bean to bring to your future in-laws for the weekend, bring a medium roast. There is nothing wrong with going down the middle of the road on this topic.
A dark roast (Italian, espresso, French, continental, New Orleans) is dark brown in color and has a sheen of oil on the surface of the bean. It is believed that the bean’s point of origin is disguised as a result of darker roasting. With some dark roasts, you may taste a smoky, or even burnt, flavor. And remember that the amount of caffeine is decreased as a result of added roasting. While not being a French-roast drinker, I do like a darker roast myself and do not mind giving up some of the caffeine for this taste profile.
In the early days, the green coffee beans were roasted in a heavy pan over the fire. Nowadays, coffee is roasted in a roasting factory– some small and some ginormous – generally in the country in which the coffee is going to be consumed.
It takes so little equipment and time to roast your own coffee. I am wondering why no one has shared this information with me before. After watching the videos below, I am ready to arm myself with this simple equipment and roast my own beans. I love this kind of thing.
There are so many cool facts about this humble and elegant drink. One little bit of information leads to another interesting tidbit. I am thinking about taste profiles, aged beans, acidity, food pairings . . . you name it! So much to know. So much fun to learn.
Here is a super informative video that takes you on a Color Journey of Coffee Roasting. It’s only 4:23 long and worth watching. It also will help you understand why you prefer the roast that you do, as it discusses taste profile with different stages of roasting. Cool!
And how about this idea of roasting coffee beans in a popcorn popper? Fun! It is a recommended method for getting started with home roasting. If you’re like me and like to experiment with new ideas and learn about how things work, I am thinking it would be a fun taste treat to try this. It literally takes minutes to have your coffee fresh-roasted each morning. Wow! What a fun thing to do on the weekend for your Monday morning coffee! [P.S. According to other research I did, shoot for a popper with a minimum of 1250 watts.]
Here is the Popcorn Pumper that he talks about lasting a long time in the video. It has the recommended 1250 watts.
Proctor-silex Hot Air Popcorn Pumper 5 Quart
http://amzn.to/28TUWZe
. . . and here is a real-deal coffee roaster if you don’t want to mess with the popcorn popper:
FreshRoast SR500 Automatic Coffee Bean Roaster
http://amzn.to/28MgkSh
Papua New Guinea Organic Wild-grown Unroasted Green Coffee Beans (1 LB)
http://amzn.to/28PkmIX
Home Coffee Roasting, Revised, Updated Edition: Romance and Revival
http://amzn.to/28MiAsU
Bellemain Micro-perforated Stainless Steel 5-quart Colander-Dishwasher Safe
http://amzn.to/28OaluO
And this? I want!
Lodge Cast-Iron Skillet L10SK3ASHH41B, 12-Inch
http://amzn.to/28Nb8yy
Whew! What started out as a simple question has my mind spinning. There is no short answer as coffee roasting is a complex and fun science that brings to us such a miraculous beverage. Experiment with some green beans and leave a comment, reporting to us your roasting results! Fun, fun, fun!
Life is a lively event. Roast up some beans, drink coffee, and get to it.
What’s stopping you?
[Just the facts, Ma’am is inspired by and extracted from personal experience and research, informative youtube videos, and “All About Coffee Knowledge Cards” – published by Pomegranate Communications, Inc.]
Boots the Badass Coffee Babe here to talk Percolator Coffee . . . Are you thinking that this brewing method is just too old-timey or outdated or un-hipster-esque? Does the image of a percolator bring back your mother’s or grandmother’s Wednesday morning kaffee klatch? Or a church supper? Or a rousing Saturday night of Polish polka on a waxed dance floor? Or Uncle Dean’s summer mountain cabin? Or old-timey conversating between the old folk sitting around a kitchen table?
Ignorance is bliss, or so they say. What I considered to be an innocent Borrowing turned out to be an act of Brazen Temerity: I borrowed (translate: nearly lost) the glass plug that fits into the percolator lid for my playtime pleasure. I was setting up an opulent mud-pie party for my dollies and, after scavenging the kitchen cupboards and drawers for Items of Elegance, I came across the glass perking plug — which was to become the most perfect and elegant crystal teacup. I didn’t give it another thought until the next morning . . .
Howdy to all of you super-outdoorsy souls who are planning your menu for this summer’s camping, climbing, rafting, bicycling, kayaking, or hiking trip. It’s a general truth that dehydrated meals are the way to go when you’re going to be carrying any kind of weight on your back or in your boat . . . and it’s also a general truth that while some of these ready-made meals that you buy in expensive outdoor stores are pretty darned good, others are, at best, kind of mediocre. Why not set mediocrity aside and start each day on the trail with a fresh and energizing cup of Bircher muesli? It’s easy to make, it’s healthful, and it tastes great!
Bircher muesli is one of those meals that tastes good for breakfast, lunch, or dinner. It is a healthy and creative choice that tastes good if you roughly follow the script of oats, fruit, coconut, honey, nuts, berries . . . you get the idea. It’s made of good stuff that is easy to pack and you can prepare it in advance of the trip. And the best part? Muesli doesn’t require any cooking, which makes it an ideal choice for those trips that are going to include some dry camps. Easy, healthy, tasty, and easy to prepare . . . you can’t get it wrong.
I started packing my own version of Bircher muesli the summer that Mitch the Mobius joined the trail crew as Camp Cook. This particular crew worked trail up in the high High Country so the work season was short. We made summer base camp at one of the high lakes once the snow receded and the supply horses could make it up the trail. We operated as Trail Rovers who did trail maintenance, cleaned up camp sites, and packed out a whole heck of a lot of annoying garbage from the High Country. Depending on the destination, one might have to pack some overnight gear to cover the necessary miles — but, as a rule, we all generally did our best to return to camp each night to eat around the fire and sleep in our roomy, canvas wall tents.
We actually had it pretty good in camp, as it was stocked at the beginning of each season with gear and supplies, compliments of Sam, Jim, and Katy — our much-appreciated district pack horses. At the beginning of the summer, we had brief and glorious access to butter, eggs, cheese, and cream . . . and we even had an ice cream maker for our season-end Ice Cream Feed — the snowfields providing us with just enough “ice” to “freeze” the cream. Albeit, the ice cream ran a bit on the soft side, but it was pure 100% wilderness luxury.
Mitch the Mobius was what you would call an Unknown Quantity. He came from Havre, Montana, and was a self-professed jack-of-all-trades. I don’t know about the veracity of his self-professing, but one thing we were quick to learn about Mitch: He was an Ace Bull Shitter who ruled camp with a Mighty Spoon. What Mitch made, we were to eat . . . all according to the Rules of Mitch. And that was that. His was a simple system: Whatever we didn’t finishing eating the night before was added to breakfast. Whatever we didn’t finish eating at breakfast was added to dinner. And so it went. This might not sound that bad, but think back to your past few meals. And imagine combining them all together. Trust me. It’s a bad idea.
No matter how much complaining we did, Mitch stuck to his Zero Tolerance Policy of Leftovers. Mitch added dinner macaroni to breakfast scrambled eggs, and he then added said macaroni-scrambled eggs to beef barley soup for dinner. There was no end to the ludicrous chain of combinations. Leftover Morning Coffee was used as the liquid ingredient for dinner cornbread –> coffee-cornbread went into the next day’s breakfast pancakes –> coffee-cornbread-pancakes went into dinner biscuits. I think you get the idea. You had the sense that what had been served as our first meal our first night in camp was still morphing itself in Mitch’s Petri Pot of Anthropological Proportions — resulting in an enduro of marathon indigestion that would only end when we ate our final camp meal in early September.
This is when I started to make my own Bircher muesli. I could guarantee that I was going to start my day right with food that wouldn’t sucker-punch my gut later in the morning. And it was simple. I would soak my muesli in my mess kit the night before and hang it in the bear bag. Voila! Instant healthful breakfast awaiting my morning.
It all came round right when the district’s horse wrangler came up the hill to pack our gear out for the season. It was Tradition that the wrangler would come bearing berries for pie and cream for the ice cream maker. All of us were quite vocal, along with some strident cussing, that Mitch was not to lay the breath of a single fingerprint on our end-of-season Berry Pie a la Mode. No, as much as we all knew the rules of the trail to respect Camp Cookie, Mitch was not going to throw a tangle into our Ice Cream Soiree.
Love and happiness . . . this picture makes me feel good inside. It makes me think of a rundown little honky tonk in a tiny town . . . one of those towns with crooked streets and more taverns than there were bakeries, grocery stores, and churches combined. It was the place where my sister, Ranger, and I used to go dancing every Friday night. Friday night dancing . . . we wouldn’t have missed it for all the Joe in Latin America, Africa, and the Asia Pacific combined — the music was just that good.
With love and xox, Boots the Badass Coffee Babe
Hey y’all. Boots here. And as we are going into hiking, camping, and glamping season, I am thinking about ways to keep your coffee hot and your coffee cold. In other words, we are going to be talking about thermal mugs, insulated containers, and the good ol’ homely, tried-and-true coffee thermos in the next few posts.
Now this thermos had to be one of the most trail-worn thermoses I have even seen. It was one of those tall green Stanley models that looked like it had been handed down through the ages since the dawn of Manifest Destiny. You couldn’t help but think of all the lunch hours and picnics that this thermos must have poured its way through to get that mean looking. It was scarred up, dented, and ugly, and it truly was a testimony to the quality of the Stanley company’s product line. It was still keeping the Banks’ family coffee hot through all of the abuse it had been subjected to.
One of them would pull the coffee boiler from the fire while the other readied the Sacred Stanley to receive its daily sacrament of Joe. Usually Bill poured and Doreen steadied. Doreen would cluck about the importance of being careful while Bill filled the Stanley to the very brim.
I dug for a spell until Doreen told me to stop. She laid Bill and the Stanley to rest, and I can’t tell you how enormous that moment felt. I have been to funerals before, and have shed my share of tears. But this. Seeing someone being laid to rest in one of his favorite spots on the planet in a damned thermos gave me pause. I could see how our physical selves all truly return to the ash from whence we came. The Cycle of Life is enormously dizzying and, if we are lucky, we have someone special in our life who we can hold on to to ease the spin.
When we returned to the campfire, I laid a blanket around Doreen’s shoulders. I poured her a Coffee Nudge and sat with her for a while. No one else knew that she had just laid her best friend and husband to rest. It surely does occur to me that hidden sorrow has to be one of the most difficult things that we carry with us in life.
Cabin Door Coffee 