Sample Roasting: Round 1, Stage 1
Goooooood morning and happy Monday!
Today we’re going to be diving big into sample roasting. We’ll start off by defining what sample roasting is, get into what the process looks like for Smooth Coffee Co, then finish off with the results from this week’s sample review! But first, the news:
BUSINESS UPDATES
Starting off with looking ahead, this week I’ll be getting some bids on one of the major infrastructural projects to get this roastery started. Pictured below is an old redwood shed that my grandpa used to store his roofing tools in back in the day;
We’re already redone the siding and replaced that useless old door with a new window;
And otherwise she’s in great condition! I need to get water and sewer lines run to it, get some extra power run to it, replace the doors and insulate the whole thing, but assuming I can get the state health department and city of Sand City to sign off on it, this will be the future site of the Smooth Coffee Co. roastery.
Permits for both of those endeavors, along with Air Resource Board information, are well in the works. My SBA loan application is still under review but is due for comments from the bank this week as well, so I’m hoping that next week’s post contains a lot of exciting updates!
Alrighty, boring stuff done. Let’s get on with the coffee!
MY SAMPLE ROASTING PROCESS
Coffee roasting is a wild world of unknown potential, canvases that have been painted by the producers and growers of the world that require you, the roaster, to fill in the fine details, and roasting samples is the first step in finishing that great work.For Smooth Coffee Co. I've developed a 2 stage protocol that emphasizes exploration and education. This week we completed Stage 1 of this process for seven coffees, gaining some valuable baseline knowledge about these coffees and how they perform at different temperatures and roast times. For today’s blog we won’t go too deep into the specifics of the variables that can be altered in coffee roasting; expect more of those kinds of details next week as we review the 2nd stage of our sample roasting process.
Of the seven coffees, five were from Burundi, one was from Ethiopia and one was from an Indonesian island called Flores. After roasting and tasting two sample roasts per coffee, Stage 1 revealed that the three Burundi’s that were processed in the “washed” style all performed the best with similar roast times and temperatures. The “honey” process Burundi seemed to enjoy a little less heat and the “natural” process Burundi enjoyed a little less time. The Ethiopian coffee performed well at similar times and temperatures as the Burundis, but I got the sense that it wanted a little less of another variable known as “development time ratio” or “DTR” (more on this next week). Lastly, and unfortunately leastly, the Flores coffee’s flavor profile was so unappealing that it is no longer under consideration. Think of the smell of the inside of a mechanic’s garage and you wouldn’t be far off from the taste.
Below, you can see how I enter my roasting and sensory review data into a matrix that will develop into a complete picture of how a coffee behaves as different variables change. Assuming I decide to purchase this coffee a significantly more in depth sensory review process will take place, analyzing a much wider range of each variable to really find the best possible presentation for each coffee.
And that’s basically how I do it! From this data I’ve chosen some specific sets of variables that I’d like to see for each coffee to try to get a better sense of their potential and, hopefully, find a coffee or two to buy to release later this year!
TTFN
And that’s all for this week friends! Tune back in next Monday to get the lowdown on Stage 2 for this first round of coffees as well as some (hopefully) good news regarding getting this party started for real! Catch y’all then.Cheers,
Noah
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