second crack

well.. I'm nursing some excellent home brew (coffee that is) at the moment. Some Kenya AA and some Timor Leste A1 which I scored from coffee snobs as part of their starter pack. I must admit I sat on my green beans (not literally) for a couple of months before roasting them, mostly because I was too busy to give them a second thought, but partly because I was a bit apprehensive about roasting them, knowing that I had a steep learning curve ahead of me.

but it's that time of year again, and we decided to only give christmas presents this year that we'd made ourselves, partly to save some money, but mostly because we wanted to invest a little of ourselves in what we were giving.

so after a bit of trial and error with the peru segundus (a good batch to experiment upon given the irregularity in colour and size of the beans: the reason i'm sure that they were included in the starter pack) - where I over-roasted the first batch, and under-roasted the second, you start to get a feel for how it all works

i've got a gene cafe coffee roaster at home which allows you to roast around 300g of coffee at a time, which may not seem like much, but it's actually plenty when you consider how many variables you have to monitor at one time!

the good thing about this machine is that it rotates off access, so the beans are in constant motion, up and down and from side to side, meaning in theory at least that they should roast pretty evenly.

also, you can set the variables so that time and temperature can be individually monitored and adjusted, which is fantastic

so i roasted up quite a few batches, any of them back to back. and even though the gene cafe has its own built-in cooling system, which lasts for 10 min at the end of each individual roast, I felt that the machine was running hot enough to not have to keep pre-heating it to 150C, as I do for the first roast of the day

needless to say at our mates gathering christmas party the home roast went down a treat, and I ordered a bunch of one way seal zip log bags, and hand wrote my own labels, so the presentation was pretty good as well

but the big thing i am noticing is how much i'm enjoying freshly roasted coffee at home!

i'm giving it 3 days or more to allow the beans to degass after roasting, and the crema is unbelievable! much better than what i've been able to produce with less fresh coffee, which goes without saying i guess

at the moment i am experimenting with each batch by applying slightly different roasting times for the same beans. so one batch of the same beans might be roasted to just before second crack kicks in in full, and another might be left until just after, and another a little more after that, until the roast starts to smoke a bit, and the wonderful aroma of the aromatic oils permeates the room and the whole house!

its a good thing that I like the smell of coffee, coz it tends to linger. but my wife hardly touches the stuff, so I tend to be a bit conscious about when i roast so as not to gross her out

my 20 month old daughter is fascinated by the whole process, however, as i explain to her every step along the way

not sure if all that information is sinking in or not, but don't be surprised if we witness the emergence of a master roaster in about 15 yrs time!

Cheers,

ACG