- 1st
f
E .pd apter
E
FR Ch
R A I M O ND FEIL
COFFEE
ROASTIN
G
fiADE SIfiPLE
A GUIDE THROUGH
PHILOSOPHY, PRINCIPLES,
RECIPES PROFILING, SAfiPLE
ROASTING
& EVERYTHING IN
BETWEEN
Copyright © 2018 Raimond Feil
All rights reserved
Edited by: Joseph Enge
Illustrations by: Kerttu Kruusla
Book design and cover by: Annamari Kenk
Full Book ISBN: 978-9949-88-582-4
www.coffeeroastingbook.com
Practical advice of 12 years roasting experience made simple
to accelerate your learning in coffee roasting
Although this book is also intended for beginners, I still assume that
the reader has at least some kind of basic idea and understanding about
coffee roasting. Therefore, I haven’t covered beginner ABC details.
In this book, I’m going to talk about practical hands-on coffee roasting. I
will discuss profiling and how to profile sample roast, how to avoid over-
and under-roasting, how different variables in roasting change flavours
in the final cup and the principles that govern the roasting process. I will
share and review all my philosophies and ideas that became fundamental
for my practices and that formed my way of roasting; and a lot more.
I’m going to give you all the necessary tools so you can successfully
develop your own roasting profiles and edit the ones I present here. The
same tools will help you to become a better, smarter, and more consistent
coffee roaster.
This practical handbook is a collection of my experience, knowledge,
thoughts, and beliefs on coffee roasting I have been discovering and
figuring out during the 12 years I have worked in the Specialty Coffee
industry.
With this book, I want to make every new coming coffee roaster’s life
easier, help baristas to gain knowledge on roasting when they have
so little access to information but are seeking it, provide tools and
knowledge to beginner coffee roasters and roasting entrepreneurs so
they could make better tasting coffee sooner and have less struggles with
product development. Also, I believe that many already professionals
will find something new from the pages of this book to think about. I
hope this book will find its way to many coffee farmers and help them
with knowhow on roasting and thus make it possible for them to roast
their own coffees with precision and understanding to accelerate the
improvement of their coffee growing, processing skills and techniques. I
believe this book will accelerate anyone’s learning curve and give deeper
understanding of coffee roasting.
5
WHY WOULD YOU TAKE fiY
KNOWLEDGE AND EXPERIENCE
SERIOUSLY ENOUGH?
I have been working in the coffee industry for 12 years and been lucky
to spend almost all of that time with specialty coffees.
My route in the coffee industry has been similar to many other coffee
professionals out there. Starting as a waiter, I then became a barista in
the usual random way. Suddenly, I was hit by a whole new world, the
coffee world, and got carried away with it as a hobby. Without hiding my
interest for the subject, I really got into it to the point I received an offer
from the owner of the coffee shops I worked for to become a coffee
roaster.
In 2005, I had become the first specialty coffee roaster in the whole of
Estonia. The coffee shop I was working then had 4–5 other shops, so
we decided that it would be a great idea if I started training all the
baristas and created uniform know-how for all our staff too. I had
become officially Coffee Roaster and Coffee Trainer.
In 2006, I participated in the local official Barista Championship where
I finished 6th. As I was pretty hard on myself, I never went back to the
competition as I was afraid of failure. Well, probably I failed even more
with that decision. So don’t make that same mistake if you are really
after growth, knowledge and becoming a better person and coffee pro!
In 2007, two coffee guys offered me to join their team in creating a new
coffee roasting company which sounded like an upgrade for me. I was
responsible for developing the full training program and managing
everything to do with production. 6 months after I joined the new team,
we got our Probat L12 running and the first greens roasting. I spent
around 5 years in (then) Gourmet Coffee (Coffee People now), roasting
and training and trying to figure out the intricacies of roasting. At one
point I finally bumped into a hypothesis that helped to get the puzzle
6
together on how roasting’s different variables could be connected to the
taste development in the cup. I tested the ideas many times back and forth
so as to be convinced of their reliability, and fortunately, they worked. I
also developed my philosophy of roasting at that time.
After 5 years at Gourmet Coffee Roastery, I had the opportunity to
start another roastery with partners from Latvia. This was something
for me, as I become a co-owner.
After 2.5 years of preparation and struggles with bureaucracy, we finally
managed to open the doors of Rocket Bean Roastery (and a Coffee Shop)
in April of 2015. One year after opening, I decided to leave the company.
I had worked there with the guys for 3.5 years, teaching everyone about
specialty coffee and developing full scale production from greens buying
to quality control. I was in charge of everything to do with coffee in that
company.
Now, 2.5 years later I have written and published a manual on what I
know best, coffee roasting.
7
CONTENT
S
Introduction 10
CHAPTER ONE
Approach to roasting: Philosophy and the principle 13
Your roasting philosophy determines how you do it,
and where you’ll end up14
The roasting philosophy16
It’s not about the numbers, it’s about the principles of nature19
CHAPTER TWO
Everything about production roasting 23
Section 1 26
Profiles untangled 26
The roasting process 33
How do the first & second phase in general
affect taste development? 52
Profiles & recipes 56
Section 2 64
Roasting for espresso 64
Uni-roast or was it omni-roast?
How filter/espresso roasts differ 65
Blending for espresso 68
Classic approach—espresso as a different and darker roast 73
Alternatives to fine tune and modify the profiles 80
CHAPTER THREE
Everything about sample roasting 83
Profile sample roasting—the basics 85
The process of sample roasting 88
How to read the temperature gauge precisely 98
Sample roast profiles 103
Profile development 106
8
CHAPTER FOUR
Transferring profiles 109
From sample roaster to production roaster 110
Swapping one production roaster for another 119
CHAPTER FIVE
Quality control 121
Tasting and other ways to test, measure and control quality
CHAPTER 124SIX
Everything else that doesn't fit Into the chapters above 129
Tasting 130
Chew the roasted bean 130
Cup tasting tools and the rules we used in our lab 131
How to improve your tasting skills? 132
A clue that makes a difference to your coffee experience 135
What’s with the wood taste? 137
Cleanliness 13
Why it’s a good idea to clean your machine properly, 8
thoroughly and consistently 13
Three reasons why a coffee roaster may catch fire 8
14
Roasting 1
142
Does your roaster really have the
capacity the producers say it has? 142
Greens’ hopper and green coffee 144
Smell your coffee 145
Can you hear coffee cracking in a
Loring Coffee Roaster
and how to get the clean smell out of the Loring sample trier?
145 Cinnamon, Full City, Italian, etc.— 146
What the heck is up with those? 147
Second you
Should crack
use your 90 plus coffees to tune your new roaster? 148
Ideas on roasting experiments
149
Afterword 15
Acknowledgements 5
15
7
9
INTRODUCTION
Around 12 years ago if a barista wanted to get really high-end knowledge
about espresso brewing and other brewing methods, they had to pay for
training classes from cool, badass and expensive coffee dudes and gurus
like Tim Wendelboe, Frits Storm, Troels Overdal Poulsen and other coffee
geniuses. At the time, everything to do with coffee roasting was rather
a secret for every roaster. Almost no one even mentioned the simplest
things like the length of their roasts back then.
12 years ago, there were only a handful of specialty coffee shops around
even in the big metropolitan cities, not to mention medium cities or towns
where there were mostly none. I remember visiting London in 2006, and
there were maybe 4 or 5 specialty coffee shops. But somewhere on the
road to today, a change, a big change occurred. Suddenly, everywhere in
the world specialty coffee shops started to appear almost in every city.
Today you can find them nearly on every corner in big cities and definitely
you have a choice to pick from in smaller cities and even towns in most
of the world. What has triggered that? Could it be that the free access
to knowledge played a part in it as well? I believe that to some extent
it definitely did. At some point, espresso and other manual brewing
knowledge weren’t that secret anymore. Suddenly everyone started to
discuss the topic openly and share their knowledge and experience. All
the tips and tricks were available to everyone. Blogs, forums, Youtube,
and even Google got filled with all this information. Today you’ll even
find that a lot of coffee shops share their brewing recipes for free on
nicely designed cards and on their web-sites. When people started
sharing their knowledge freely, I believe, this was the point that triggered
the industry development acceleration. It created transparency and
growth. Now, 12 years later all that super-secret brewing knowledge is
no longer super- secret. It has become absolutely free and something
that is the basis for growth, development, and innovation.
10
(oFfK( Ro§(TI)G: fi§4K (IfiptK
Today, the industry has started to talk about roasting curves and profiles
more than ever. But nobody still talks freely about the details that make
the real difference. People are still somehow defending their knowledge
of roasting—“yeah, I can talk to you about my profile… (not really)”—you
probably experienced these slightly awkward discussions about roasting
where everybody wants to be a cool sharer but all those involved can still
sense they’re protecting the secret that makes them better than the rest
of us. Although the roasting side of the industry has experienced huge
growth, I believe it can still be improved.
There are a number of books, articles, blog posts, and writings about
coffee in general, coffee’s origins, brewing, coffee plants, coffee varietals,
botanics, on how to open a coffee shop, etc. But there are only a few
books on coffee roasting, and these too give only some basics and
directions or get overly deeply into chemistry that really doesn’t help
beginners and roasting much, to be honest.
Two and a half years ago when I left my last coffee company, I wasn’t
sure if I’d ever get back to roasting and coffee at all. It looked like my
life had reached the point of making a 180-degree turn to somewhere
else. It’s all natural. This happens to many professionals in any field
and industry all around the world. Even in the coffee industry, we have
plenty of people who have gotten into coffee after working a decade or
so and becoming real good professionals in other industries. But shortly
after I left the company, I stumbled upon a thought—“it would be pretty
stupid to trash all of my experience and knowledge on coffee roasting I
have gathered during the 12 years I have spent in coffee.” So, I decided I’d
record all of that and publish it, share it with everyone who is interested
in the topic, be it a professional coffee roaster, a home roaster, a barista,
coffee enthusiast, coffee farmer or just someone who is curious about
the topic and wonders about how to roast coffee well.
11
CHAPTER ONE
APPROACH TO
ROASTING: PHILOSOPHY
AND THE PRINCIPLE
(oFfK( Ro§(TI)G: fi§4K (IfiptK
YOUR ROASTING PHILOSOPHY DETERfiINES
HOW YOU DO IT, AND WHERE YOU’LL
END UP Once I participated in a blind cup tasting session in one of the well-known
UK roasteries. I had brought my sample roasted coffees to put besides
their roasts as it’s always interesting to know how your roasts compare to
other roasts and hear what others think of your stuff. During the tasting
session, I asked them out of curiosity what their roasting philosophy was.
The guys were a bit stunned by the question and told that they didn’t
really know they had one or maybe that they were looking for fruitiness
in coffee. I thought to myself: c’mon—every coffee is fruity in its own way.
They are fruity even if they’re bit over- or under-roasted. When they lack
aftertaste or are astringent, they can still be fruity. I was thinking—how
can they know how to hit the nail on the head, flavor wise, if they don’t
have a clear vision of what exactly they are looking for? Maybe I was just
misinformed. But either way, we want to have a clear idea of what we do
and don’t want regarding taste in our coffee.
Knowing what you want to have present in the final roasts helps you
to more efficiently shape the taste profile and make smarter decisions
during the roast profile development. Having a clear idea about what taste
characteristics you don’t want to have in your roasts will help you figure
out what causes these unwilling characteristics and thus you’ll be able to
bypass them with more ease. So, you want to be clear about the specifics
like aftertaste, complexity, balance, juiciness, fullness, roundness,
under-development, over-development, astringency, bitterness, etc.—
where they stand for you in your roast taste descriptions and in what
quantities. Roasting philosophy is your personal roasting rule that help
to guide you to your true flavor development goal.
13
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Basically, in short:
Know exactly what you are looking for in your coffee.
• How do you want your coffee to taste like?
• What are the characteristics you want to find there?
• What characteristics you don’t want to find there?
The better and clearer you can answer these questions, the higher is the
probability you will end up nailing your goal. These three questions will
help you to develop your approach and the philosophy of your roasting.
If you lack a roasting philosophy, you’ll end up everywhere on the profile
map and it’s going to be challenging to nail your taste attributes. You will
never be sure if that’s the best you can get out of your coffee or if there
are other ways to open the flavors even further.
When you trace fruitiness in your coffees, all your coffees will taste fruity,
even the Brazils that are more creamy, chocolaty and nutty by nature.
When you trace acidity in your coffees, they will end up being acidic
and sharp. When you just want your coffees to be light roasted I bet they
will, but their taste will most probably be under-developed with blunt
unpleasant acidity and limited sweetness. Of course, if that’s what you
want then sure, go for it.
If you feel that you keep banging your head against the invisible wall of
not getting the roasts right although you kind of are doing everything
correct, change the way you approach the whole roasting process. Change
your fundamentals, perspective, and philosophy. Or, if you don’t have one,
create it. The more precise the formulation of your roasting philosophy,
the easier it will be to find the way to your taste development goal.
Your roasting philosophy determines how you roast your coflee!
It’s a fundamental of what you build your roasting on
and a road map that helps to reach your goals.
14
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THE ROASTING
PHILOSOPHY
This is what I am looking for in my roasted coffees:
A natural balance and full potential of all taste attributes
that have been encoded by nature
into every coflee bean.
The roasting process is not a manipulation tool to change
but a means to open up the existing balance and potential
of every particular coflee bean.
So what do I mean by encoded by nature:
• coffee variety
• coffee’s growing environment
• processing
or all the processes that precede roasting and that shape the taste of
the coffee.
What I mean by natural balance and full potential of all taste attributes I’ll
explain with the next example.
Imagine a strawberry.
Imagine it super ripe.
At the very peak of its
ripeness.
You can recognize this very special point of ripeness
by smell and touch already.
15
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Now…
Imagine biting that super bright red strawberry
Can you feel how it explodes in your mouth?
How your mouth waters, in an instant.
How these tiny droplets of red juice sprinkle all over your palette and the
scent is drawn from the mouth into your nasal cavity when you chew?
Can you feel it?
The aroma…
The texture…
The symphony of that marriage of sweetness and acidity.
That mind-blowing juiciness.
It’s all over the place.
That fullness of mouth feel.
And the taste that lingers for a while on your palette, although there is
no more strawberry in your mouth.
Maybe you didn’t even notice when you swallowed the flesh of that berry
as it was so perfectly balanced in taste.
And you really want some more!
Maybe you even reached for another berry without noticing already?
Now….
Imagine a peach.
Super ripe peach.
At the very peak
of its ripeness.
We can go on and on
and on, forever…
16
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I don’t believe anyone has ever tasted super ripe fruit that is unbalanced
and tastes ugly, except maybe when one doesn’t like a particular fruit. I
have not yet met one human being who has said that they don’t like ripe
fruits or berries and instead prefers over-ripe or under-ripe fruit. Except
bananas, which are the weird exception where some people like them
almost green and some all the way brown.
Coffee is a berry too. I believe the same principle applies to coffee roasting.
It’s like ripening that berry. When I roast my coffee, I want it to taste the
most balanced it can be. For me, balanced means that super-ripe point
of the previously mentioned strawberry, where the sweetness is married
to acidity so it becomes a single sensation—juiciness.
When coffee is balanced, its taste attributes become juicy, round, full,
long lasting, and fill the palette from front to back. Even the aftertaste
will linger on and on. This is due to the sugars and acids reacting and
vibrating in our sensory system when they’re spot on. Everything just
falls into place by itself. But as soon as you move away even a bit to
one or other direction, for example with your profile length, you are
breaking that balance. This, in turn, creates flawed sensory results in
view of roundness, fullness, juiciness, long lasting flavor and complexity.
(Sweetness + acidity =) juiciness, complexity, aroma, taste at the front of
the palette, taste at the back of the palette, long and pleasant aftertaste—if
any of the given taste attributes are off, the profile needs to be adjusted
until they aren’t. Only after that, I start focusing on the individual taste
nuances of the coffee. I don’t worry whether the taste nuances are or are
not going to be present after the overall taste balance is established. They
are always going to be there if the overall balance is spot on; and they
are always going to be the boldest they can be the way they are encoded
into any given coffee and its origin. That’s just what my experience has
taught me.
17
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IT’S NOT ABOUT THE NUfiBERS,
IT’S ABOUT THE PRINCIPLES OF
NATURE
PRINCIPLE OF THE NATURAL DEVELOPfiENT OF
NATURE
At some point on the way to figuring out how coffee works during
roasting, I came across a random thought on how the roasting process
affects taste development. It was a hypothesis that I started to test and
wanted to confirm. Together with the hypothesis came along the tools
and ways of confirming or disproving the idea. After hundreds of tests
and experiments with the sample roaster and production roaster, I figured
out the roasting and found that the same idea applies to coffee brewing as
well. But then I didn’t even realize what I had actually discovered. While
writing this book, I came to the realization that the principle I had been
applying to my roasting and brewing worked in a wider range. When we
look around us more closely in life, any topic or area, we find that they
are governed by principles. If you understand the principles, you can
achieve, change and build anything you want if you put in some work.
But how can I be so sure that it was a principle I had discovered? Because
the principles govern a wide range of processes of similar nature, not just
one as formulas do, and this is exactly what the given principle does.
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The basis of the principle is this:
LOW HIGH THE PEAK &
QUALITY QUALITY THE
BALANCE
OVER
UNDE
R
TIfiE
The line reaches from left to right on an invisible horizontal axis that
repre- sents time. Its pace is ruled by nature. The vertical axis is our
olfactive perception of quality. (Olfaction is also a measuring tool created
by nature.)
It describes perfectly how fruits develop in nature. First, they are
under-ripe. The riper the fruits get, the better we perceive their sensory
quality until it reaches the high peak of sensorial quality—balance and
full development. This is the point that we call fully ripe. We can’t get
higher than that with the perceived quality. The fruits have reached their
maximum levels of sweetness and acidity where they are maximally
balanced. The speed of ripening is managed by nature. Each fruit has its
own designated progression towards perfect ripening. When the process
advances onwards from the fully ripened point, over-ripening occurs.
The further we move from the fully ripe point the lower the perceived
sensory quality gets.
Now, if we remove the fruit part from the explanation above, we can see
that it describes any process that includes under-, peak and over-de-
velopment. This principle also governs coffee production in its every
single stage. 19
(oFfK( Ro§(TI)G: fi§4K (IfiptK
Look at the ripening of the coffee cherry. We all agree we want the coffee
to be picked at its highest ripening point and we are all on the same page
what that point would be.
Processing, for example, consists of many separate stages. Each of the
separate stage works according to the same principle—they have under-,
peak and over-development. Fermentation can’t be neither too long nor
too short. You have to nail the peak to get the quality. The pace at which
fermentation happens is governed by nature again. In drying, we have
to reach the certain moisture percentage between around 50–0%. We
have to catch the peak that is somewhere in the center of the whole
process. The pace of drying is again governed by nature. You probably
did notice I didn’t mention pulping or washing here because these are
not individual stages of development. They are transition points where
one process turns into another. They are the key points that lock in the
development points of the preceding stage.
For example with storing the greens, beans can’t be used for best results
just after drying the coffee has been completed. Coffee needs some time
to rest to get the fresh grass-like taste out of it. Also, when it gets too old
the taste quality decreases. The same principle is at work again.
By nature, roasting is a similar process to processing. It consists of two
main phases (first and second) and each of the phases needs to be
handled separately as we do with fermentation and washing, although
they are part of the same process. Each needs to have a certain length
and devel- opment locking point. The first phase has a naturally
occurring locking point—the beginning of cracking. The second phase
gets locked with the roast end temperature and time. Also, both phases
need to occur with their natural speed that has to be found.
What about the storage of roasted coffee? Again, you need to wait a few
or more days before the coffee has degassed or calmed down and stabi-
lized before you can get the max potential from that coffee. The so-called
20
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quality peak of the roasted coffee lasts a certain length of time before it
starts to decrease (though here it lasts longer than in any other process).
These quality peaks are determined by the roasting process, equipment,
and technology.
Grinding is the point that ends the storage process by locking in the
freshness and quality of the bean and is also a point of transition for
brewing (talking here strictly on the basis of the Specialty Coffee approach
where coffee gets ground just before brewing).
All the same things apply to brewing. There are just far more variables
we use to influence the ripening of the brew. The recipes of pour overs
and espressos are guidelines on how to reach the ripest point of the brew.
Water, even its mineral and pH composition, is governed by the same
principle. We can’t have too high or too low mineral and pH content.
Except that we do not have the same timeline here since the composition
of water is influenced artificially most of the times.
Water brewing temperature. I’m not going to go into it but I hope you
already see the correlation.
The recipes for brewing, the profiles for roasting, the proper techniques
for processing, and protocols for harvesting are all recipes on how to
reach the peak quality point of each process. It’s basically all about the
principle and well-timed lock-in points (which are harvesting, pulping,
washing, end of drying, start of roast, first crack, end of roast, grinding,
end of brewing).
The better the lock-in points are timed,
the better is the quality of the results.
21
Don’t forget to claim
your copy of the full book!
Get your copy from:
www.coffeeroastingbook.com
Follow at:
www.facebook.com/coffeeroastingbook
Send me an e-mail:
[email protected]
This book is about practical hands-on coffee roasting.
It will discuss profiling and how to profile sample roast, how to avoid over-
and under-roasting, how different variables in roasting change flavours in
the final cup, principles that govern the roasting process; and a lot more.
This book will give you all the necessary tools so you can successfully
develop your own roasting profiles and edit the ones presented here.
The same tools will help you to become a better, smarter, and more
consistent coffee roaster.
It’s a condensed collection of Raimond’s 12 years coffee roasting
experience with Specialty Coffees.
“This book can really push beginners in the right direction as well as provide advanced
roasters with new ideas and thoughts on roasting craft.”
- Tomáš Nossek, Roastmaster and QC at Rebelbean.
