Chad Council

Roasted: Sumatra Mandheling Grade One DP

May 25, 2008 – 8:17 am

First off, the name of this coffee sounds like it is of much higher quality than my roasting ability. Not to be intimidated, I fired up the Fresh Roast this weekend and gave it a shot. If you’ve never seen green coffee beans, well, here’s what they look like:

Since roasting can sometimes produce some pretty acrid smoke, my roasting adventures have been relegated to the outdoors. Sadly, this means I can’t really roast during the winter. My little Fresh Roast machine just can’t overcome the freezing ambient temperatures.

Here you can see the beans just starting to warm up and float around inside the chamber. I fill the chamber to below the horizontal line, so you can get an idea of how much the beans are jumping around in there.

A mere 5 minutes later, the beans have started their “second crack” and I tweak the timer knob over to the cooling cycle. With this roaster, I’ve found there are so many variables that cannot be precisely controlled that I usually go off color and sound.

After the beans have gone through the cooling cycle in the roaster, I spread them out in a wide mesh strainer to cool for another hour or so. This gives me a chance to visually inspect the beans and remove any that look too light or are overly burnt. I was pretty happy with the evenness of this batch.

I let them rest in an unsealed canister for about 12 hours so they could continue to out-gas. I think next time I could go another 20 seconds roasting for just a hair darker. The end result of this batch: Pretty darn good.