Roasting Technique

[expat]

It just hit me. After watching lots of YouTube videos of people roasting I've not seen a technique that The Lovely & Talented Roast Mistress uses. Besides looking at the beans as they roast, and smelling them, and listening to them, she is constantly tasting the beans. As they get closer to drop she's pulling a few beans out with the tryer, looking, smelling, then chewing the beans to determine their taste.

These get spit out but all through the process I'm hearing, "too green", "too grassy", "not yet", "almost there", and finally "that's it!" Of course "that's it" goes along with the smell and look of the beans. It all has to agree.

So is that an unusual roasting technique? Is that something you do?

[ccooper]

I have seen it done by Willem Boot, but only after the roast. The beans must be awfully hot to sample during the roast.

[expat]

The Lovely & Talented Roast Mistress does it after the roast too but all the way through the roast as well. Yes, the beans are pretty hot but not anything you couldn't handle. She also roasts to a shrink percentage.

So say she's roasting 8 Ethiopian Sidamos. She'll want about 3 light roasts, 3 mediums, and 2 darks. Then we blend all that together to create one uniform taste of the Ethios. So she says I wan't about 15.7% shrink for the light roast, 17% for the medium and 18.5% for the dark. And she just about hits those numbers on the button. In weighing up the roasted beans, the finished product will often be, to the gram, the same finished weight. Never more than 10g from one to the other and she's usually roasting between 10 and 10.5 kg at a time.

Glad she does the roasting and I chase the money!