Roasting up a storm filled with chaff and debri

Just a side note: sometimes the chaff catches on fire underneath the roasting drum.


I have been learning so much and the more I learn, the more excited I get to go back to work on roasting the perfect batches. I now have some delicious guatemala, costa rica, harrar, and a wonderful blend called summer snow.

Making some progress on the espresso, I feel at this rate I should have something good by next wednesday. It takes a whole lot of tasting, hoping, tasting, blending, weighing, blending, roasting, tasting, hoping, roasting..... You get the idea. I know the day I come upon that magical taste I will be thankful for all the days of hard work, but I think it will take a couple of months of slight tweaking to get it perfect.

Opening is coming up fast, only a week and a day away!! Working hard to get samples out to all those around us and to get all the coffee that will be available at the opening ready. It's going to be a lot of work, but I'm getting the recipes down so after this it's just repeating that magical formula over and over again.

Practice makes a happy and confident roaster

I have been spending my days roasting the same thing 5 times in a row to practice consistency and more strongly develop my individual roasts. Of course there are adjustments here and there when I see something is not coming out right. I have also been working on making a delicious house blend and espresso for Jo on the Go. I do believe that by the end of the week I will have something superb.

Talked to Julie who is opening up a coffee shop hang out up on rr12. I will be going out and visiting her soon. She says that there will be an airpot with my name on it, so lookout for fresh coffee out on RR12!

Will make more detailed post about tastings and blends coming soon!

23 January 2008

Today was more of a play day with coffees. I roasted up a bunch of samples for Jo on the Go and experimented in making a couple of possible flavored coffees for Justin's mom. I made one snickerdoodle cookie and one sweet dark chocolate. Surprisingly they worked out really well.

Tomorrow morning will be full of coffee tastings and espresso makings. I am Trying to create an espresso with Harrar. I like it straight as a single origin espresso, but it doesn't have enough body to be good for a latte. It's really fruity and sweet and light, and kind of just disappears in milk.

Also tomorrow, Amber's mom will be visiting and I'm going to set up a little cupping demo for her, send her off with a couple of small bags of coffee.
We will also be working on the invites to the grand opening only a couple of weeks away!

The hardest thing to do now is to find the time for all the roasts I want to do. I am keeping detailed logs, but everything is so fast sometimes that it's difficult to keep all the information I'm writing down organized.

Hope to have some info on that espresso here soon. Keep drinking.

Roastin' stylie

Today I roasted the first parts of the first experiment that I'm doing with my roaster. I installed it yesterday evening and then my mom came to town. Today I worked in my new founded laboratory for about 5 hours. It's sunday, so I took a little bit of a break in the morning.

I started off with the costa rican coffee. My experiment is to roast the same weight of bean to different set max temps on the machine for a set amount of time. My weight is 1.51 lb, my time is 13 minutes. The variable, temperature, changes in incriments of 10 from 310 F and 410 F. I record the beginning weight, the ending weight, the set temperature and the final temperature, as well as the highest temperature reached during the roast and at what time in the thirteen minute roast period. I hope to find out several things what is happenning to the bean in the various stages of it's roasts, as well as find it's ideal range for bringing out the flavor. I will be cupping each one the following day and recording the flavors, mouth feels, cup intensities, and my personal opinions.

Today I roasted trials 1-3 (310 F, 320 F, 330 F). at a set time of 310 F, for a set time of 13 minutes, the first trial didn't even go into the second pop. The second trial had the same results. The third trial peaked right before the second pop.

After this trial is finished, I will experiment in changing the set temperatures at different times during the roast.

My goal is to find a temperature that brings the coffee in the first crack and then settles it out right before the second crack, and a temperature change, will occur.

Soon I hope to get photos up on this site to show more of what is going on inside the walls at rivertown roasters.

Grand Opening is Feb. 9th, 2008, From 10am to 3pm.

Installations

Today is the day that we try to install the roaster. Gee I hope this day comes out successfully. We shall know by 5 how it all turns out.

Also, I'm trying to get this cool grinder for the shop, as well. http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=220191719480&_trksid=p3907.m32&_trkparms=tab%3DWatching

Created the blog, hoping everything will be starting soon. I should receive my roaster this week. It is bought and paid for, so I damn better see it's shiny black face in my door by friday. The excitement kills me. Looking forward to long hard hours crankin' out the hot beans.

With this blog I want to sit down and tell the public of my adventures behind the roaster. Some will be awful, inexperienced child's play, but then there will also be just detailed, boring information about how the roasts that day went, how much consistency there is between one roast and another that is to be identical to it. All this and more in the future of Rivertown Roasters.