Coffee Roasting and Grinding

Contents
• What happens during coffee roasting
• Importance of roasting
• Degrees of coffee roasts
• Coffee grinding
• What happens to coffee after roasting and grinding
• Packaging roasted and ground coffees

What is Coffee Roasting?

 Roasting coffee transforms the chemical and physical properties of green coffee beans into
roasted coffee products.
 Unroasted beans contain similar acids, protein, and caffeine as those that have been roasted,
but lack the taste.
 The roasting process is what produces the characteristic flavor of coffee by causing the green
coffee beans to expand and to change in color, taste, smell, and density.
 It takes heat to speed up the chemical reactions that develop and enhance the flavor -
aromatics, acids, flavor components are created, balanced and altered to create desired flavor,
acidity, aftertaste and body.

As green coffee is more stable than roasted, the roasting process tends to take place close to
where it will be consumed. This reduces the time that roasted coffee spends in distribution,
helping to maximize its shelf life. The vast majority of coffee is roasted commercially on a large
scale, but some coffee drinkers roast coffee themselves in order to have more control over the
freshness and flavor profile of the beans.

Relevancy of Coffee Roasting

• Bring out the intrinsic value that were built up the bean
• Roasting has a huge impact on the cup taste.
• No perfect roast because the roast type and degree are determined by the brewing method
and the final consumer
• Different coffee beans benefit differently from defferent roasting technics

What happens during coffee roasting?

 Colour changes from green through yellow to light brown before getting to the desires roast.
 Weight loss 14 – 20 % depending on the degree of roast (i.e. out turn ranges from 80-84%).
 Increase in volume by about 35%
 Aromatic flavours will be gained
 Crackling sounds occur ( Known as the 1st & 2nd cracks)
 Smoke will be produced hence a well ventilated room will be required
 Chaff will be produced as the silver skin peels off (more in unpolished and natural coffee)
 The coffee roasting process consists essentially of sorting, roasting, cooling, grinding and
packaging.

Roasters typically operate at temperatures between 370 and 540 °F (188 and 282 °C), and the
beans are roasted for a period of time ranging from 3 to 30 minutes. Roasters are typically
horizontal rotating drums that are heated from below and tumble the green coffee beans in a
current of hot gases. The heat source can be supplied by natural gas, liquefied petroleum
gas (LPG), electricity or even wood. These roasters can operate in either batch or continuous
modes and can be indirect- or direct-fired.

Those who roast coffee often prefer to follow a "recipe" or "roast profile" to highlight certain
flavor characteristics. Any number of factors may help a person determine the best profile to use,
such as the coffee's origin, varietal, processing method or desired flavor characteristics. A roast
profile can be presented as a graph showing time on one axis and temperature on the other,
which can be recorded manually or using computer software and data loggers linked to
temperature probes inside various parts of the roaster.

Indirect-fired roasters are roasters in which the burner flame does not contact the coffee beans,
although the combustion gases from the burner do contact the beans. Direct-fired roasters contact
the beans with the burner flame and the combustion gases. At the end of the roasting cycle, the
roasted beans are cooled using an air cooling system. Roasted coffee beans can also be cooled
using fine water mist, which is known as "quenching" and is considered inferior to air cooling as
the water soaks the fresh beans with moisture and oxygen particles making it stale almost
instantly. Following roasting, the beans are cooled and stabilized. This stabilization process is
called degassing. Following degassing, the roasted beans are packaged, usually in light-resistant
foil bags fitted with small one-way aroma lock valves to allow gasses to escape while protecting
the beans from moisture and oxygen. Roasted whole beans can be considered fresh for up to one
month. Once coffee is ground it is best used immediately.

Degrees of Coffee Roast

Roast level Notes Surface Flavor

After several minutes the beans “pop” or "crack" and

Cinnamon roast, half
Light visibly expand in size. This stage is called first crack. Dry Lighter-bodied, higher acidity, no obvious roast flavor
city, New England
American mass-market roasters typically stop here.

Full city, American, Sweeter than light roast; more body exhibiting more balance in acid, aroma, and
After a few short minutes the beans reach this roast, which
Medium regular, breakfast, Dry complexity. Smoother than the traditional American "medium" roast, but may display
U.S. specialty sellers tend to prefer.
brown fewer of the distinctive taste characteristics of the original coffee.

High, Viennese,
Full After a few more minutes the beans begin popping again, Slightly Somewhat spicy; complexity is traded for heavier body/mouth-feel. Aromas and flavors
Italian Espresso,
Roast and oils rise to the surface. This is called second crack. shiny of roast become clearly evident.
Continental
Double After a few more minutes or so the beans begin to smoke. Smokey-sweet; light bodied, but quite intense. None of the inherent flavors of the bean
French Very oily
Roast The bean sugars begin to carbonize. are recognisable.

Why some people blend coffees

1. To make coffee of higher cup quality than the ingredients individually.
2. To use cheap lower quality coffee for commercial gains.
3. To create a signature blend that lends consumers.
4. To attain consistency from crop year to year

Coffee grinding
Degree of grinding alters the coffee’s solubility in water
Basic grinds
1. Fine
2. Medium
3. Coarse
Specific coffees grind correlates to a particular brewing method.

Coffee Code
“The language of coffee must be learned by tasting.” - Jim Reynolds, Roast Master

The Four Elements of Coffee Tasting

 Aroma

Aroma is the first hint of how your coffee will taste. In fact, most of your sense of taste
actually comes from your sense of smell - which is why coffee can taste so satisfying and
sublime.

 Acidity

Acidity, in tasting terms, doesn't mean sour or bitter; it's a lively, tangy, palate-cleansing
property, ranging from low to high.

 Body

Body is the weight or thickness of the beverage on your tongue. Body ranges from light
to full.

 Flavour

Flavour is the all important melding of aroma, acidity, and body that creates an overall
impression.
The Four Fundamentals of Coffee

 Proportion

Use the right proportion of coffee to water. This is the most important step in making
great coffee. For the most flavourful cup of coffee, we recommend two tablespoons of
ground coffee (10 grams) for each 180 milliliters of water. If coffee brewed this way is
too strong for your taste, you can add a little hot water to your cup of brewed coffee.

 Grind

The shorter the brewing process, the finer the grind. Different brewing methods have
different grind requirements, so grind your coffee for the brewing method you use. The
amount of time the coffee and water spend together affects the flavour elements that end
up in your cup of coffee, and the design of your coffee maker dictates how long the
coffee and water sit in direct contact during the brewing process.

 Water

Use fresh, cold water heated to just off the boil. A cup of coffee is 98 percent water.
Therefore, the water you use to make coffee should taste clean, fresh, and free of
impurities. Water heated to just off a boil (90° to 96° C) is perfect for extracting the
coffee's full range of flavours. Any cooler and the water can't adequately do the job.
Automatic coffee makers heat the water for you. Make sure the one you use gets the
water hot enough.

 Freshness
Use freshly ground coffee. Think of coffee as fresh produce. The enemies of coffee are
oxygen, light, heat, and moisture. To keep coffee fresh, store it in an opaque, airtight
container at room temperature. For the best results, coffee should be ground just before
brewing. Whole bean coffee stays fresh longer because there is less surface area exposed
to oxygen. By grinding beans each time you brew, the freshness is preserved.
Coffee Tasting and Terminology
Acidity
Taste those high, thin notes, the dryness the coffee leaves at the back of your palate and under the edges
of your tongue? This pleasant tartness, snap, or twist, combined with an underlying sweetness, is what
coffee people call acidity. It should be distinguished from sour or astringent, which in coffee terminology
means an unpleasant sharpness. The acidy notes should be very clear, powerful and transparent in the
Costa Rica, rich and wine- or berry-toned in the Kenya, and deeper-toned and muted in the Sumatra. They
should be drier in the Costa Rica and perhaps a bit sweeter in the Kenya. Robustas and some lower-grown
arabica coffees may display virtually no acidity whatsoever and consequently taste flat.

You may not run into the terms acidity or acidy in your local coffee seller's signs and brochures. Many
retailers avoid describing a coffee as acidy for fear consumers will confuse a positive acidy brightness
with an unpleasant sourness. Instead you will find a variety of creative euphemisms: bright, dry, sharp,
brisk, vibrant, etc.

An acidy coffee is somewhat analogous to a dry wine. In some coffees the acidy taste actually becomes
distinctly winy; the winy taste should be relatively clear in the Kenya. In promotional tags you may find
the tones that I call winy described with other terms: fruity, dry fruit, and various specific fruit names,
particularly berry and black current. The main challenge is to recognize the fundamental complex of fruit
and wine-like sensations; once you do that, you can call them anything you like.

Body
Body or mouth-feel is the sense of heaviness, tactile richness, or thickness when you swish the coffee
around your mouth. It also describes texture: oily, buttery, thin, etc. To cite a wine analogy again,
cabernets and certain other red wines are heavier in body than most white wines. In this case wine and
coffee tasters use the same term for a similar phenomenon. All of the sample coffees I recommend should
have relatively substantial body -- either the Costa Rica or the Sumatra will be the heaviest and the Kenya
-- usually a medium-bodied coffee -- the lightest. In terms of texture or mouth-feel the Sumatra may
display the most interest -- perhaps an oily or gritty sensation. But avoid inventing something you fail to
taste. None of these coffees will be thin-bodied or anemic.

Aroma
Strictly speaking, aroma cannot be separated from acidity and flavour. Acidy coffees smell acidy, and
richly flavoured coffees smell richly flavoured. Nevertheless, certain high, fleeting notes are reflected
most clearly before the coffee is actually tasted. There is frequently a subtle floral note to some coffee
that is experienced most clearly in the aroma, particularly at the moment the crust is broken in the
traditional tasting ritual. Of the three coffees I recommend for your tasting, you are most likely to detect
these fresh floral notes in the Kenya, but depending on the roast and freshness of the coffee you could
experience it in any of the three samples. Latin-American coffees brought to a medium roast, like the
Costa Rica, may display a sweet vanilla-nut complex in aroma. The Sumatra also may exhibit smoky,
pungent, earthlike, or spicy notes. Finally, if your Costa Rica is a La Minita, the aroma should have a sort
of echoing, resonant depth to it. The same should be true of the Kenya, whereas you may find that the
aromatic sensations of the Sumatra are rather immediate and limited, without a sense of dimension
opening behind and around them.
Finish
If aroma is the overture of the coffee, then finish is the resonant silence at the end of the piece. Finish is a
term relatively recently brought over into coffee tasting from wine connoisseurship. It describes the
immediate sensation after the coffee is spit out or swallowed. Some coffees develop in the finish -- they
change in pleasurable ways. All three of the sample coffees I recommend should develop in the finish. I
would predict that the pungent tones of the Sumatra may soften toward cocoa or chocolate in the finish,
and the dry wine or berry tones of the Kenya turn sweeter and fruitier.

Flavour
Flavour is a catch-all term for everything we do not experience in terms of the categories of acidity,
aroma and body. In another sense, it is a synthesis of them all. Some coffees simply display a fuller,
richer flavour than others, are more complex, or more balanced, whereas other coffees have an acidy tang,
for instance, that tends to dominate everything else. Some are flat, some are lifeless, some are strong but
mono-toned. We also can speak of a distinctively flavoured coffee, a coffee whose flavour characteristics
clearly distinguish it from others.

The following are some terms and categories often used to describe and evaluate flavour. Some are
obvious, many overlap, but all are useful.

 Richness

Richness partly refers to body, partly to flavour; at times even to acidity. The term describes an
interesting, satisfying fullness.

 Range

This is one of my favorite tasting concepts. Imagine that the sensations evoked by a mouthful of
coffee are a musical chord. Then take note of where the main interest and complexity of sensation
is concentrated. The Kenya will have great complexity throughout, but particularly in the higher
ranges, the equivalent of treble notes. The Sumatra, if it is a good one, will be very complex in
the lower ranges, the equivalent of base notes. The Costa Rica will be more integrated and total,
perhaps with sensation more concentrated in the middle range.

 Complexity

I take complexity to describe flavour that shifts among pleasurable possibilities, tantalizes, and
does not completely reveal itself at any one moment; a harmonious multiplicity of sensation. The
Kenya is probably most complex; if the Sumatra is a good one it may also be complex, though
perhaps less balanced. If the Sumatra is not a particularly good one it may feel hard and mono-
toned on the palate. The Costa Rica is probably more like a singular bellclap -- perfect, resonant,
contained and complete.

 Balance

This is a difficult term. When tasting coffees for defects, professional tasters use the term to
describe a coffee that does not localize at any one point on the palate; in other words, it is not
imbalanced in the direction of some one (often undesirable) taste characteristic. As a term of
general evaluation, balance appears to mean that no one quality overwhelms all others, but there
is enough complexity in the coffee to arouse interest. It is a term that on occasion damns with
faint praise. The Costa Rica sample should be most balanced, although it probably has fewer
idiosyncrasies to balance than the other two coffees. The Kenya should be both complex and
balanced; the Sumatra may be imbalanced by overbearing pungent tones and may be a bit rough.
Espresso Terms
The following terms often come up informally in discussions of espresso coffees, though more as terms of
connoisseurship than of trade. They relate as much to the effects of brewing and roasting as to the
qualities of the original green bean and are less clearly defined than the technical tasting terms defined
earlier.

 Sweetness

The sensation this term describes is not the brassy monotone of refined white sugar, but rather a
vibrant natural sweetness shimmering inside and around other positive sensations. Sweetness in
an espresso is owing to inherently sweet beans that have been produced only from ripe fruit, to a
tactful roast style that carmelizes the sugars in the bean rather than burning them, and to proper
brewing technique.

 Bitterness

The bitter bite of some espresso coffees should be distinguished from the acidy tones of a
medium-roast coffee, since the bitterness described here is a taste characteristic encouraged by
dark-roasting. It is not an unpleasant characteristic. Most West-Coast American and many Latin-
American blends are bitter by design. Espresso drinkers in these regions find the lighter-roasted,
sweeter espresso blends preferred by northern Italians bland by comparison. If the distinction
between bitter and acidy seems abstract, an analogy might help. Acidity is like the dry sensation
in most wines, a mild astringency balanced by sweetness. The bitter sensation that arises from
dark-roasting is more analogous to the bitterness of certain aperitifs like Campari, for example; it
is a more dominating sensation, and less localized on the palate.

 Pungency

A word to describe the pleasant, fresh-sweat, sweet-yet-twisty tones of a good West-Coast-style

American espresso blend. If there is a Peet's coffee store near you, go in and sniff the coffee bins
for a suggestion of the sensation I am describing. This aroma complex is seldom encountered in
Italian espressos, but is a common characteristic of North- and Latin-American blends. It is
apparently created by a dark roast achieved slowly. Bitter-sweetness might be another word for it.

 Smooth

Smooth is an epithet describing an espresso coffee that can be taken comfortably without milk
and with very little sugar, a coffee in which a heavy body and the sweet sensation described
above predominate over bitter and acidy tones.
Coffee Cupping
A method used by coffee tasters, whereby coffee is sucked vigorously from a large spoon, whilst
almost inhaling.

Cupping Equipment

 Identical cups for each coffee to be tasted

 The coffee samples and a coffee measure
 An empty cup.
 A spoon about the size and shape of a soup spoon
 A glass of water in which to rinse the spoon between coffees
 A glass of room temperature water for clearing the palate
 A jug or spittoon
 A kettle of very hot water, just under boiling hot

Cupping Preparation

 Plan to taste at least two coffees, as a frame of reference.

 The grind should be medium/filter. If the coffees are ground in succession in the same
grinder, start with a clean grinder and wipe out the grinder between samples.
 The degree of roast should be as much the same for all samples as possible. The lighter
the roast, the more the true unique flavour of the coffee is exposed; the darker the roast,
the more all coffee begins to taste the same, and the easier it is to hide the flaws.
 Measure out the same amount of dry coffee into each cup, about 8g (1 heaped tbsp) to
150ml of water. Sniff the dry coffees and write down any noteworthy observation about
the dry smell.
 Pour water just off the boil to the same level in each cup. Do not stir. Wait a couple of
minutes, then bend over each cup and smell the surface, which is a mass of floating
grounds.
 Break the crust (the grounds floating on the surface of the cup), by inserting the tasting
spoon through the surface flotsam, again while bending over the cup and inhaling the
aroma at very close range. You could spoon up and smell some of the grounds and liquid
from the bottom of the cup this action will probably help to settle the grounds as much as
anything.
 With the spoon, lightly skim any remaining grounds off the coffee's surface, and sling
them into the extra empty cup.
 Get a medium-full spoonful of coffee, place it against your lips and virtually inhale it,
with plenty of air and into your mouth, slurping noisily, attempting to get some of it all
the way to the back of your mouth immediately. Swish it around your mouth, and after a
few seconds, spit the liquid out. Make some notes for later comparison, rinse the spoon
and your mouth, and go on to the next coffee.

Try to taste all the coffees at the same temperature and in close conjunction with each other. As
the coffees cool, go back and taste them again, as the flavours may change slightly.
CUPPING FORM

Sample # Fragrance Aroma Flavour Acidity Body

0-10 0-10 0-10 0-10 0-10
1