Coffee Roasting

Coffee Roasting… Well that escalated quickly!

Coffee for me has never been stagnant thing, it has always been a constantly changing process and every other week I was trying something new to improve the flavour in my cup. There were two reasons for this, firstly, and probably most important, was the quest for the perfect cup of coffee and secondly, was my love of the processes involved in the coffee making ritual.

There are always variables involved in making a coffee that affect the taste; everything form the freshness and quality of the beans to the type of grinder and the water that you use. I have spent years tweaking my coffee making process, each time I made progress it was mixed emotions, happy that the coffee was a little better, but disappointment that I was still way off what I thought it could taste like and what I believed I could achieve.

I always had this desire to make coffee taste as good as the smell. I eventually ended up with a good espresso machine, cafeteria, vacuum pot, burr grinder, hand grinder, filtered water and the best coffee cup collection in Ireland (see previous blog post) but I always felt the single factor letting the process down was the quality of my beans.

I began to look for the ultimate coffee bean, after a lot of research (3 days flapping about on the internet… I’m very impatient) I decided that the only way to get the best coffee bean was to roast it myself; excellent, more bloody coffee equipment. This was back in about 2004 when the whole home roasting thing was still very new and I set my sights on a little machine called the Alpenrost.

Ahhh my Alpenrost… it could roast 300g of green beans in about 17 minutes, I know it doesn’t sound like a lot but I only had to roast every few days.

I was very nervous at the start, it’s very easy to set these little things on fire, so my equipment consisted of my roaster, a fire extinguisher and oven gloves (so I could fling the thing out the window if it burst into flames). After a week or two roasting my confidence began to grow and I was bringing the roast well into the second crack.  Filling my house with smoke and setting off my fire alarm on a very regular basis, my neighbours must have wondered what the hell was going on!!!

My First Roast tasted like cardboard. 

The first few roasts were useless but once I got into the swing of things the results blew me away, the coffee was the best I had tasted, smooth, sweet and complex flavours that changed from roast to roast, I was loving this. Never satisfied though, once again I began to think of further improvements; the phrase ‘Bigger is Better’ came to mind.

I began to look at upgrading to a 1kg Roaster, this was a big step; the machine was €2800 and weighed 65kg! I was finding it hard to justify the upgrade, especially as my little Alpenrost was doing such a good job, then once again my future wife stepped in to help. One lazy Saturday I decided to teach her how to roast, I could go into detail of what happened but to cut a long story short after about 20 minutes we were standing in the kitchen filled with smoke, the fire alarm ringing and my lovely Alpenrost smouldering in the sink. As well as being a kleptomaniac (see previous post) I had discovered that she was also a pyromaniac.  To be honest I didn’t mind as it gave me the excuse I needed to plough ahead and buy the stupidly big, financially crushing and completely unnecessary roaster (I must have thought I was going to be the new Bewley’s!).

 My Roaster arriving (not me in the photo)

Ready for its new home

I ordered my Toper Cafemino and several months later it arrived, it was massive, what had I done? In another moment, of what I can only describe as complete and utter madness, I had also ordered a small amount of green beans to get me started……200kg to be exact.  To this day I still have no idea what the hell I was thinking.  

The next few weeks were a roller coaster ride and a very steep learning curve, I’d come a million miles from my lovely little Alpenrost. The ‘Cafemino’ machine was a little temperamental to say the least and took a bit of TLC to get the best roast, but my God the results were mind blowing. I was roasting a Java Blawn just into the beginning of the second crack, I had finally found my perfect cup, my Holy Grail of coffee, it had only taken all of my time, patience, money and a large part of my social life.

My love affair with this roasting beast unfortunately had to come to an end and after moving to new work premises (I had the machine in work) I had to let it go. I had been at the peak of my coffee perfection and now I was back to where I began. It’s not all bad though, as coffee culture begins to really take hold in Ireland, the emergence of the local artisan coffee roasters has given everybody access to mind blowing coffee and as I sit here, writing this, I am drinking a beautiful Sumatra Coffee, ordered on a Friday, roasted on a Monday and sitting in my grinder on a Tuesday.

As much as I appreciate other people skills and the beautiful coffee I can now buy, I still yearn to roast my own coffee again.  I have my new roaster picked out, hopefully in my kitchen in a few weeks, this time however I might keep my wife away from it as we all know where that can lead to!

Craig.