JD's coffee provoked ramblings

City? City+? Full City?

2010-02-19T17:42:00.004-05:00

Here are some questions that warrant discussion.

What do you label your degree of roast? How do you know? When do they occur?

There are several different lists of when a certain degree of roast is reached and they don’t match.

Sweet Maria’s list is as follows also with pictures as reference:
City + roast at 435°F, about 25 seconds after end of 1st crack
Full City roast at 444°F about 25 seconds after 1st ends
Full City + at 454°F about 1:50 after 1st ends
http://www.sweetmarias.com/roasting-VisualGuideV2.php

The HRO List has these divisions without temperatures but pictures as reference.
Cinnamon roast just after 1st crack
New England Roast
American Roast
City Roast
Full City Roast just after 2nd crack
http://www.homeroasters.org/index.htm

Kenneth Davids has this list in his book Home Coffee Roasting
Cinnamon roast below 400°F
New England at 400°F
American at 400-415°F
City at 415-435°F
Full City at435-445°F

And also from Sweet Maria’s, this list at the bottom of the page
George Steinert's Degree of Roast/Temperature chart:

Early yellow at 327°F
1st Crack Begins at 401°F
1st Crack Under Way at 415°F
City Roast at 426°F
City+ at 435 °F
Full City 446 °F
Full City+ 454 °F
Vienna (Light French) 465 °F
http://www.sweetmarias.com/roasting-VisualGuideV2.php

Here’s yet another site with variances: (This one is interesting with lots of nice, seemingly accurate descriptions)
http://www.cofei.com/categories/degree-of-roast-temperature-description.html

My concern is communication amongst us home coffee roasters. My Full City + may be your Full City. Yet your Full City may come after 2nd crack and my Full City is before 2nd is remotely near.

Which labeling system do you use? Is there yet another guide you go by? How can we better communicate our roasts to one another?

Some of us are able to determine bean temperature while others know the drum temperature only. Stating the temperature of when your roast ended is of great importance to some while it means nothing to me as there’s no way for me to know.

All of this occurred to me this afternoon while chatting with the owner of a USRC. He knows as much as possible about his roasts, while I know exhaust temperature and time. Of course, these are both usable factors; I can base roasts on the information and then measure the bean temperature with an IR thermometer immediately upon pulling the drum. That could be great post roast information like recording the weight loss; there’s no way I can know it before the roast ends in my Gene Café.

So, what do we call our roasts? How and why?

Notes from the Roasterie Feb 7, 2010

2010-02-08T22:07:00.002-05:00

So far today I've roasted 2 batches Brazil Morenhina Formosa "Raisin" Coffee, 1 batch Ehiopia D-P Haile Selassie Sidamo. So now, into the roaster...

Oooh, Yemen Mokha Ismaili roasted to 15 seconds into 2nd crack at 15:15 and dumped to the cooling tray, now cooling... Munch test, sweet, fresh & lively. Roasted weight 182 out of 227 - 20% moisture loss. I see some killer espresso next week! Just about any Yemen is a favorite and this will be a very good coffee. Mmmmm.

Next into the roaster Nicaragua Limoncillo Pacamara DP. I love this one - chocolate covered fruit candy in this coffee. It's an SHG bean so hitting it a little harder starting out at 471F right off the bat.

Nicaragua Limoncillo Pacamara DP - batch # 796... almost to the 400 pound mark!
227 grams into the preheated roaster, hot from the previous Yemen roast

Huge chaff from this one... Beans yellow at 6:30/390F

9 minutes environmental temperature is 435F... 1st crack at 11:30/455F, nice rolling 1st, drop to 444F for a nice stretch to a kiss of second ...

Argh! 2nd at 16:00 Would have preferred 17:00, but... Ugh, divots; too hot, too fast... Next time a warming stage of 300F for 3 minutes, perhaps...

Munch test is like eating candy at the first crunch, kind of creamy at the end. Very even roast. Finish weight 187/227 - 18% moisture loss.

Brewing in your drip pot

2009-03-18T07:52:00.002-04:00

Most cups of coffee can be improved with a little additional work in the kitchen. What I describe below can be done in the same amount of time you usually take to brew your morning elixir.

First off, if you use a drip brewer with a “warming” plate, don’t use the warmer after the brew cycle is finished. I prefer the word “burner”. Immediately upon completion of the brew cycle, decant the coffee to a pre-warmed insulated carafe or thermos. The burner continues to cook the coffee, over-extracting the solids in the water. Everyone has tasted coffee that’s been on the burner for too long, so we all know what I’m talking about. If you’re in the market for a new brewer, please, please purchase one without a burner and select one with an insulated carafe instead. Those hotplates ruin coffee, plain and simple.

OK, now to the brewing process. This is written in order so it shouldn’t take you any longer since there will be several things happening simultaneously.

1 – Make sure your drip pot and grind basket are clean. Washed clean, not just rinsed out. Rinsing does not remove the oils from yesterday’s pot of coffee. Those oils are just aging, stagnating, putrefying and generally going rancid in your gear. Yuk.

2 – Fill the brewer with warm water. It’s OK, really, you can. It won’t hurt the machine. I fact you can use hot, if you like. Your water will come out even warmer, making for better extraction. NEVER use the carafe that comes with the brewer to fill the brewer. Use a different vessel, one that is not used for coffee. It’s possible you could be dumping “dirty” water into the brewer. Your carafe may have residual coffee oils in it and over time will damage the brewer’s heating element and other guts. After using a different vessel, you can set it out to dry or just put it away – no muss, no fuss. But don’t put it away yet, you’ll need it once more.

3 – Add the paper filter or your gold mesh filter.

4 – Turn on the brewer and let it brew a couple cups of hot water through the system. This warms the brewer as well as rinses the paper filter.

5 – Now select your coffee and grind it while the brewer warms up. Choosing the grind can be tricky. I use a medium coarse grind. If the water flows straight through, the grind is too coarse. If the water just stays in the basket, dripping very slowly, it’s to fine. The whole drip process should take about 5-6 minutes.

6 – Once the grinding is finished, turn off your brewer, and empty the carafe into your coffee cup(s) to warm them and refill the brewer. Now you can put you filling vessel away.

7 – Add the grind to the basket. If your brewer has one of those automatic buttons that stops the drip, leave the pot out from under the basket.

8 – Turn the brewer on and watch the basket fill with water making sure all the grounds get wet. I give mine a little stir to be certain. Smell the aroma of the newly wet grounds!

9 – Once all the grounds are wet, set the carafe back in place. BE SURE IT IS EMPTY OF THE WARMING WATER YOU RAN THROUGH IT! Um, I’ve forgotten a couple times, but remembered early enough so it wasn’t a problem. You don’t want to ruin the coffee or have it overflow.

10 – Wait for the brew to finish and enjoy your coffee. Please, I’m begging you; please do not pull a cup of coffee before the cycle is finished. For proper extraction, all of the water needs to flow through the grounds. Pull your cup early and the coffee will be over extracted and bitter, pull it late in the brew cycle and it will be under extracted and watery. Let all the water flow through the grounds and you’ll be happiest

A note on how much coffee to water ratio - I measure mine by weight. For my drip brewer, I use 10 grams per cup of coffee. A typical coffee scoop of 1 tablespoon is roughly 10 grams. There’s no need for you to measure by weight unless you want to become a coffee geek like me. Actually, there’s a good reason to measure by weight. Different degrees of roast create different sized beans, therefore different amounts by weight. In addition, different degrees of roast dry the bens more or less. So, a smaller bean may weigh more than a larger bean. If a scoop holds, say 40 beans of a light roasted, smaller but heavier coffee, the brew will be different than a darker roasted, larger, but heavier bean.

Here’s a link to the scale I purchased. It’s perfectly sized for the coffee cupboard. It’s the 1000g Digital Dosing Mini Scale. Orphan Espresso.

Last, keep your machine clean. There are many products for cleaning brewers. Cafiza is an excellent product and will remove all the stains, oils and general grunge normal dishwashing will not. It’s true! Once you use it after a few months of using your brewer, you’ll be amazed at how brand new it looks after using Cafiza. Also be sure to de-scale your brewer every couple months. There are products available for this as well.

Have fun, drink coffee, do silly things with more energy!

Say what?

2008-11-14T09:36:00.003-05:00

Verbosity is a grand thing in my mind because it just may increase the chance of clarity. I recently had the opportunity, perhaps even benefit, of watching a series of e-mail exchanges erupt into quite a state of vitriol that has left me wondering why and how it happened.

A typed and sent post lead to a series of misunderstandings that escalated each time an explanation was sought and then given. In the beginning, there was no intentional animosity in those posts. However, as they continued to be passed back and forth, anger grew and tempers flared. In general and in hindsight, the words were quite OK for what they said. Presentation presented the problem.

I look at historical letters and often think "I wish I could write like that". Napoleon to Josephine, John to Abigail, statesman to statesman. These were skilled letter writers.

E-mail and text messaging has brought us to the brink of truncated thoughts. In this too-much-to-do and no-time-to-get-things-done world, it seems we may have reduced our communications to little tiny, chopped off thoughts and I wish this weren't so. Facebook is very good for this type of communication, but an e-mail post should be clear with no ambiguity.

I still have letters, yep, actual letters written to me by a friend in the service of our country 25-28-30 years ago. I treasure these artifacts not just as missives from a friend in another land, but as an example of a time, even in my own lifetime when personal communication was much
more clear.

Given the conversational nature of our e-mails and other electronic communiques, it's easy to lose track of emotion when one line makes more sense to the sender than it might to the reader(s). Sitting at the same table, that same utterance could work just fine with all the other communication skills we possess. Abbreviated words and, in particular, thoughts have taken over, it seems.

Hell, someone, sensing this problem, invented emoticons - someone perhaps who understood communication skills were being abandoned for shortened thoughts and shorter words. Or they were invented by someone so lazy, they couldn't be bothered to write a complete thought. In any
event, could you just see Napoleon professing his love for Josephine with smiley-face emoticons wrapped in a heart? What a historical document that would have been!

In other words, use words. Lots of them, but not too many. One of the reasons Abraham Lincoln was such a successful speaker was his very careful editing skills. He always knew who he was speaking to and he edited two words to one wherever possible. His speeches reached the uneducated and at the same time did not speak down to the more educated.

I could go on, but I won't.

Roaster Rebuilds - Two in one day

2008-10-13T19:07:00.003-04:00

With three roasters I really expected one to be in full working order at all times. Well, the Fresh Roast 8 was, but it only roasts a few cups of coffee at a time and this would be little help in providing my few customers with the pounds they need.

The Gene Cafe was heading south and the Junk Yard Tow Truck .5K (full story here with pictures) got busticated.

The drum for the Gene Cafe was slipping out of it's cradle as it rotated around. It slipped loose of the thumb catch that was to hold it locked while in the upside down position of rotation. I poked and prodded until I realized the wheel at the heater end was quite sloppy - it seemed the bearings were coming unglued. I called Tim Skaling at Fresh Beans in Utah and he immediately sent me a replacement part which I quickly installed. Roaster repaired! And am I glad for that - I really enjoy air roasted coffee.

The Tow Truck; the roaster I love to hate. I like it very much, but it's noisy, has no chaff collection, makes a lot of smoke yet it will roast a half kilo at a time. That's snob talk for it roasts a full pound of green coffee. I wasn't very carefull a couple weeks ago while opening the door and snagged the heater array on one of the drum vanes and broke the ceramic on the array.

Repairing it meant a trip to Ace Hardware and buying a new 500 W outdoor light fixture to take apart. I spend $12.00 to keep the 40 cent bulb bracket. In any event, I go the array repaired and decided to replace the motor with a faster one. The first motor was 12 RPM and the new one is 20 RPM. I'm reading 60 RPM is desired, but that seems like the beans will stick to the drum. I'll buy one and try it, though. The new 20 RPM motor seems quite fast to me but roasted coffee comes out of the drum. I also made some other adjustments and immediately ran 6 pounds through it with great success.

It was a good repair day!

Ouch! Roasting.

2008-05-28T07:48:00.003-04:00

Arrrrgh! I ruined a batch of Yemen Mokha Mattari the other day. My roaster (the Junk Yard Tow Truck) has a “trier” – a scoop so I can pull out a small batch of beans to look at. The trier caught in one of the drum vanes and spilled many beans onto the heating array. LOTS OF SMOKE! I had to stop the roast, clean out the burning beans and replace one of the heating elements. The batch of beans sat in the drum for about 8 minutes cooling while I made my repairs but I was determined to not waste this outstanding coffee, even though I knew it was already seriously wasted. Once the repairs were made, I began roasting again. Now this batch had cooled to about 160˚F from, according to my log, 370˚F. To say I stalled this roast is an understatement. I took it to first crack, raising the temp back to 400˚F. I let first crack roar through and stopped the roast. There were dark oily French roast beans with light cinnamon roast in there and everything in between.

I let the beans rest three dyas before I brewed a cup and it ain't so bad. I don't get any "baked" flavors and the darker beans are giving a nice full body with a good chocolate presence. Overall, the full character of the bean isn't there and I won't be trying to duplicate this roast anytime soon.

Say what??

2008-01-17T19:55:00.000-05:00

Once, while listening to a report on the radio, I heard the woman being interviewed refer to the amalgam of several items. The topics and items aren't that important, but the story was about the coming season of new TV shows.

Amalgam. Good word.

Here’s a lady apparently intelligent enough to interview network heads and division chiefs in the business using the word amalgam. Not bad at all, really. Unfortunately, her downfall was her pronunciation. She’s not a foreigner, which would allow for accent, but rather sounds like an American from the west or Midwest.

Let’s look at her pronunciation: amal as in camel and gam as in Sam. Amel-gam. Huh? I thought it had three syllables

I rushed to my dictionary and looked it up.

Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.0.1) - Cite This Source

a-mal-gam /əˈmælgəm/ Pronunciation Key [uh-mal-guhm]

–noun

Her usage was correct but her pronunciation was a tad off. Now I knew this part immediately. What I discovered in a search through three dictionaries and, finally, dictionary.com was a bit surprising. It seems there is actually a pronunciation very close to hers but was still a tad off. Her usage it turned out was still appropriate:

a·mal·gam (-mlgm)
n.

1. Any of various alloys of mercury with other metals, especially:

a. An alloy of mercury and silver used in dental fillings.

b. An alloy of mercury and tin used in silvering mirrors.

2. A combination of diverse elements; a mixture: an amalgam of strength, reputation, and commitment to ethical principles.

When do we start demanding of those who present themselves as authorities or people who allow them to be presented as authorities that they prepare themselves accordingly?

Personally, I’m tired of mispronunciations in the media from those supposedly in the know.

Actually, I don’t expect much improvement when the leader of the free world can barely get a complete sentence out…

My first will always be the best

2008-01-11T14:08:00.001-05:00

I must say June 16, 2007 was a blast.

The evening began arriving at the Gem Theatre in downtown Detroit. A most stunning theatre. Light snacks and full open bars were waiting, which the "Come On Over" company took full advantage of - especially the bars. Photographers greeted us on the red carpet and at the steps to the theatre. Not once all evening did I open a door myself (unless I was going where I didn't belong...) At 6 PM the events of the evening began. The main floor of the theatre was table seating with theatre style seating in the balcony. We had great seats on the main floor. "COO" occupied 7 tables. We were by far the largest group there. The next largest was perhaps half our size.

The announcement of our first nomination for music was celebrated by much noise and cheering from the group. Imagine the cacophony when our own Paul & Chad were announced the winners. They made their acceptance speeches and disappeared stage right. Our next nomination was also our next winner: Joel Tanis, creator of the show, won for on camera talent.

By now I've got my third drink of the evening sitting next to me and am being very careful not to touch it to retain some modicum of lucidity because I'm next. For the past 5 weeks, I've been hearing I've already won my EMMY because I'm the only nominee in my category. All along this has felt very odd to me because I didn't know how the nominating process worked. But I learned - basically, every entrant is rated between 1 and 100. The higher the better. An entrant must reach a score of 70 to be considered a nominee. The single qualifying rule in judging, is, the entrant must be EMMY worthy. If they are not in the judge's opinion, they must score them accordingly. As to my category, I have no idea how many other entrants there were, but I do know I was the only one voted worthy. In other cases, if a category has 9 entrants worthy of an EMMY, they all become nominees and one of them goes to the stage a winner.

Energy is pounding through me and I'm next... They read the nominee (a formality), they open the envelope (another formality), they mispronounce my name, I go on stage, I take my EMMY from the model there and correct the guy who mispronounced my name. I thank Joel for creating the show, I thank the producers, I thank the production designer, and I tell them I'm going to let my 5 year old son dress it in tin foil the next day and I thank the audience, good night.

The first thing I hear after walking off stage right? "Congratulations, Sir! May I have that?" and they take my EMMY away from me! The guy with white gloves polishes it and hands it back to the model for the next winner... Clever! But two feet away from me is a young lady who also congratulates me and sends me around the corner. This continues until I am in the basement at a table being greeted by a very nice lady who knows my name and hands me a rather large box. AHA! My EMMY! Well, not yet; The next thing I'm handed is the brass plaque that identifies it as mine, then I am handed a small jewelers box with the special EMMY screwdriver to attach my plaque. Then I am handed the directions for attaching it. Immediately I am moved to another area where I stand in line to get my formal EMMY portrait taken, which I walk away with a copy of and am sent back upstairs to enjoy the drink I've been avoiding. All the way up I'm greeting by ushers, staff and God knows who else, all congratulating me.

OK, that was FUN!

Keith was the next winner I remember. I advised him not to let go of his EMMY when he gets off stage just to see what may happen. I never found out if he got into a fight.

We won 6 EMMy's that night. They are:

Category 45A - Musical Composition/Arrangement

Come On Over ENTHUSIASTIC PRODUCTIONS /WOTV

ChadDykema, Paul Chamness

Category 48D - Graphic Arts – Animation