Showing posts with label coffee roasting. Show all posts

I'm ready for it to begin!

Story of my life :)

In other news... I received a bona fide coffee roaster for my birthday, whohoo! My DH and his mom pitched in to buy me this lovely piece of machinery:
This was of course purchased from Sweet Maria's and came with 8 1-lb packs of green coffee beans from different regions and a double sized chaff collector. This is quite possibly my favorite thing in my whole house (DH and dog not included as "things" of course).

I've only done one batch so far... which I slightly burned. Even then it was still tolerable with enough half and half and vanilla flavor added. Next time I'll be more careful about watching for 2nd crack.

It's very quite and doesn't produce too much smoke- I just parked it under the oven vent and that was more than enough, although I do think that's why I couldn't hear the beans as well as I wanted so I'll skip that until the end next time.

I brewed coffee from the batch I roasted on Sunday both yesterday morning and this morning... not so good. The beans smell off, both burnt and with some tones I can't really identity other than "not right." The brewed coffee definitely smells burnt.

I've consulted with the experts at Coffee Geek; they have deemed this an uneven roast. I showed them the same photos of my roast that I posted the other day; I have some charred beans and it doesn't look like many of the beans reached first crack, which means those beans were "baked" rather than roasted. I need to learn how to identify first crack by sight as well as sound. With my next roast, I'm going to start out with 8oz of beans but at the same heat level, which should produce a faster roast and bring on first crack much sooner and allow me to get closer to second crack without baking.

I really need to get a 550 degree thermometer like this one from Cooper:

This is on top of my wish list (which is only in my head!)