downtown

At the dripolator downtown with misha, lauren, kyle and nate. All the coffee has me thinking coffee-geek style. Dripolator features Larry's beans, based out of Raleigh, founded by a guy Larry who visited WWC last year.

So, friday after a dan and myself study in the window of the drip, aided by my first damn good latte, i started reading about coffee. due to no soccer games over the weekend, i ended up spending a hell of a lot of time reading about coffee, primarily from the two sites listed in the previous blog entry.

Roasting Coffee is what the entry is about. I want to share my newfound expertise with anyone reading this, because the facts about roasting coffee are something i had no idea about before. Misha has chastised me about this knowledge-addiction; it is however harmless and satisfying. So on to the show: Roasting coffee at home is a hell of a lot easier than I thought. This is because the process is basically the heating of the cured and dried bean of the coffee plant; the method and style of heating is what determines the quality of the roast. Something emphasized is that almost completely everyone who drank coffee at home roasted their coffee themselves; it wasn't until the late 19th century that roasted coffee became something one could purchase, and not until after world war two that it became mainstream. Roasting coffee is the sort of thing that can be done at home, but just isn't because of convenience, ease, quality concerns, equipment, embarrassment, whatever it is. Anyway, like Kyle who is brewing beer in his room, and Lateef who makes bread on the weekends, this sort of thing is sort of normal here.

You can roast coffee in your oven, in a pan on the stove, in a popcorn maker, or in a personal, or commercial roaster. Five basic ways. Personal at-home roasters are going to be from fifty to five hundred dollars; commercial roasters from five thousand to fifty thousand, it seems. Popcorn makers that will do the trick are from ten to fifty, whether we're talking ebay or stores. The oven and stove of course would cost next to nothing.

So the first things are to secure a method of roasting and a supplier of unroasted (read "green") coffee beans. The next step is to do the business. The oven method consists of cranking the oven to five hundred degrees then putting the beans on a cooking sheet, turning only after the "first crack". This is crucial. There are two main points that you can audibly and visually check the progress of the roast: the first crack and the second crack. There are many other stages before, between, and after these points; they're just the most distinguished. First crack is when the bean is turning from light brown to medium brown, and a crack forms through the middle of the bean; the bean then releases its "chaff", which is a by-product of roasting the bean and is not kept with the finished product - each method has a way of getting rid of this stuff.

I feel like such a geek that I'm going to have to wait to continue this blog later.