Is My Coffee Too Fresh?

Welcome to the first in our new series: Infrequently Asked Questions. This is not an issue that comes up given the general lack of availability of freshly roasted beans in the current market, but coffee needs at least 24 hours and more usually 48 hours rest after roasting to lose the “grassiness” caused by the off-gassing of CO2. Most coffee takes somewhere between three to five days to peak in flavor, although that can vary quite a bit. Some beans, especially if dark roasted, can peak within a couple of days of roasting, while light roasted coffee may take up to a week. Of course, none of this is really relevant in a marketplace where coffee usually sits on the shelf for weeks, or gasp months, before making it into consumers hands.

Less Is More

There is a rather pervasive myth about coffee, namely that the darker the roast the stronger the brew. The truth is that there are two different and sometimes competing flavors, one inherent to the bean and the other a product of the roasting process. From a roaster’s perspective, I want to taste the coffee, not the roast. Much of what makes coffee interesting to me is in fact the complexity of the coffee, some or much of which gets lost the darker you roast and delicate flavor oils are broken down by excessive heat.

I strongly suspect that the myth of the dark roast is driven more by market realities than consumer taste. While light roasts have a lot of flavor within the first couple of weeks of roasting, the flavor oils are delicate and begin to oxidize outside the window of time, rendering the beans largely tasteless. By comparison, the burnt outside of dark roasted beans have a much more enduring, if less interesting, flavor that outlasts light roast coffees. Since most roasters can’t get their coffee beans on the shelves, much less put them in consumers hands, within a week or two of roasting, it doesn’t make much sense to sell light roasted coffees that are only really good for a couple of weeks. So, instead they sell dark roasted or artificially flavored coffees, both of which don’t reflect the beans natural depth and complexity.

The Magic Bean

There are a lot of myths and misinformation that gets circulated about coffee, which I suspect is at least in part driven by market forces that rely on the perception of roasted coffee as a non-perishable bulk good, rather than as fresh produce. However, anyone who has had the opportunity to taste high-quality beans roasted within days cannot help but perceive a stark contrast when compared to the vast majority of stale, over-roasted and haphazardly brewed coffee that is the standard fare. But the thing that surprises me the most is how many people I meet who have never seen green, unroasted coffee. This seems to me to be just another artifact of an industry that is built on keeping people uninformed about the true complexity and depths of flavor that can be exhibited by properly handled beans. Otherwise, coffee is little more than a caffeine delivery device. So people, here is what it looks like before and after roasting.

Honduras COSAGUAL Coffee

So what are we seeing here. Before being roasted, coffee is green or greenish-blue, small, dense and about 20% water. During roasting, the coffee turns yellow and then brown, begins to expand substantially and loses 15% to 18% of its mass, mostly water. The roasted beans in this picture are roasted to Full City, just before the beans begin to develop fissures that allow flavor oils to escape and caramelize (or what is unfortunately more common, burn) on the surface of the bean. Because coffee is a natural product, there is often substantial variation in the size and shape of the beans. Generally speaking, in higher-quality coffees, the crop is carefully screened to ensure more consistency. However, for some coffees, the heterogeneity of the beans yields a more exotic flavor. Even in the beans in this picture, which are relatively homogeneous, there can be seen a small variation in size and shape.

The BBQ Roaster

I can’t say I will miss roasting outside during the hottest days of Summer and the coldest days of Winter, but it will not be without some nostalgia that I transition from using a roaster that I spent many hours building and refining myself even if it is in favor of a more elegant and efficient, professionally built machine. So in honor of my home-made BBQ roaster, which have I fired up several times a week over the past 18 months to churn out hundreds of pounds of coffee, I have added a page to my website with photos and videos.

Costa Rica

I’m back from Costa Rica and have some pictures to share. Unfortunately, we didn’t really get any time to spend in the coffee-growing regions, but we did get to see lots of local wildlife, spend time in the rainforest and on the beach and gorge ourselves on seafood.

Good coffee was surprisingly hard to find in Costa Rica. That is in part because it is such a valuable crop, all the grade A stuff gets sold outside the country. Coffee is Costa Rica’s second largest export crop after bananas. Another reason is that the locals like to brew their coffee weak then mix it with lots of milk and sugar, masking most of the coffee flavor anyway. Even so, the coffee there tends to be very fresh. Even in the small town near where we stayed, there was a small roaster. They had a cafe a couple of doors away, but here in their store front you can see the roasting equipment in the background.

We also saw a lot of monkeys. Our last day on the coast before leaving for San Jose, a whole troop of titi monkeys passed by the veranda of our hotel room, swinging from tree to tree and generally acting goofy.

I have some more photos on my web site here: http://www.freshofftheroast.com/CRpics.html

Roaster Video

I promised a roaster video and here it is. It has taken me awhile and many attempts because I wanted to present something that was not completely and mind-numbingly boring. So here it is, my only mildly dull roaster video. It starts near the end of a city roast while the coffee is still in the phase called first crack. You can hear some of the cracks the coffee is making, although the sound is somewhat distorted by the poor quality of the mic on my camera.