Good morning and welcome to a new series of articles on homeroasting coffee! This series is sponsored by Sweet Maria’s, who kindly provided 6 pounds of coffee for me to use for these articles. I’ve been a Sweet Maria’s customer for green coffee in the past, and they’re also a great place to pick up all sorts of other things like the Nuova Point espresso cups I love (Palermo is my favorite). More than anything, though, they are a wealth of knowledge on all aspects of coffee from production to roasting and tasting. Their website is like a Ph.D. in coffee! For my roasting equipment, I will be using a Behmor 1600, that I bought used from another Kansas Citian a handful of years ago and, frankly, just haven’t used very much. With so much coffee coming in all the time for reviews, roasting more to have around just didn’t make sense. Mine is the older model, plain ol’ 1600, and Behmor’s current model is the 1600+, which has some quirks and features that are quite a bit different from mine. For that reason, this series will not focus on the ins and outs of using the Behmor, but, rather, more on the results of what I am able to do with it. I may even break out my original roaster, an air popcorn machine, and do some comparisons!
My History With Coffee Roasting
I started up in roasting around the time I started KC Coffee Geek, which was late 2014/early 2015. In fact, my story on Sept. 2, 2014, what “What Am I Roasting Right Now?” and it was Sweet Maria’s Espresso Workshop #31, 3rd Level Espresso. Back then I was using a basic popcorn popper and it was “not bad!” I haven’t tasted popcorn popper coffee in 6 years, so maybe it’s time for a revisit to see what my palate thinks of “not bad” today! Sweet Maria’s website and tutorials on popcorn poppers were how I got my start into roasting this way, and the wealth of knowledge at my fingertips was mindblowing. You can find all of this information, some written, a lot of it in video, on their website in the Roast section of their Resources page, here. There are 8 pages of information! Quite a few of their videos focus on how to use roasters, like the Behmor 1600+, so if you’re thinking about getting a coffee roaster this is also a good first place to stop and check a bunch out. Of course, YouTube will be a great resource once you figure out what you want to start with, too. My suggestion is that, unless money is not a problem, get a proper air popper and start that way.
Equipment
A couple years later, another local coffee person in Kansas City was selling their Behmor 1600 for a great price, so I jumped on that deal. I probably only ran 3-4 roasts on it. By that time, I was doing almost-daily coffee reviews and the amount of coffee coming into World Domination HQ here was staggering, so roasting more just wasn’t an option. The Behmor looks like a big toaster oven, and you basically select the weight, a profile, either A, B, C, or D, and a Program from P1-P5. And then you can add time, too. There are hundreds of forum posts and videos on the Behmor 1600 (more on the 1600+, which makes sense), so check those out. There are a million tips and tricks to be found. I’m keeping it simple, running the same batch size (150g) on the 1/2lb setting using program B and profile P1, which puts as much heat into the beans as quickly as possible.
My worry going into this is that when I used the Behmor in the past (again, only 3-4 times) the coffee had this sort of carboard-like, woody, baked flavor I didn’t like, so I am really curious if that will happen again. You see, when I got my Behmor, I had some green beans left over from my air popping days, and they were close to 3 years old at that time. I’m hoping, and thinking, those off-flavors were just the age of the greens. Before I received my shipment from Sweet Maria’s for this series, I ran a batch of those old beans, now about 5-6 years old, just because I have some left and was curious, and those off-flavors were still there. I always worry things like that may be due to the limitations of equipment, but I suspect it’s my raw materials, in this case.
Roasting 101
I’ll spare a long section on this because the Internet is full of information on every aspect of roasting coffee. Sweet Maria’s article, “Using Sight to Determine Degree of Roast” is a great first place to start. Using sight on the Behmor 1600 is a little tricky because it’s just hard to see much going on in there, even with the light turned on, so my roasting is mainly by sound and time. Also, when you’re using visuals to determine how developed your coffee is, you need to let the coffee rest a couple days because cues like surface oils won’t appear for a while. Finally, visuals can be a little tricky because it’s certainly possible to get a good roast level on the outside of the bean but have it under-roasted inside, so sometimes the outside looks great but it tastes terrible because it was underdeveloped through the rest of the bean. It’s like seeing a steak with a good crust and thinking, “Man, that thing is NUKED!” but cutting into it and it’s medium-rare inside. Only, when that happens with coffee, it’s no bueno!
Since I’ll be using mostly auditory cues for my roasting, there are two main events to talk about, called first crack and second crack. Once the green coffee is turning from yellow to brown and the Maillard reaction is well under way in the beans as sugars start to cook, you’ll start to hear some popping sounds. This is first crack and it sounds like popcorn popping, pretty loud. First crack tends to be slow at first, just like popcorn, then the frequency of the cracks starts to pick up and you’ll get a lot at the same time, then first crack sounds will taper off and eventually stop. The coffee beans are expelling water and carbon dioxide here and that makes the sounds of 1C.
Most people agree, generally speaking, that you need to get coffee past first crack (1C) for it to be drinkable. There is something called “white coffee” that I’ve never experienced, but I’ve had coffee that didn’t make it through 1C and it was horrible… thin, acrid, peanut butter mixed with grass clippings. Sound good to you? Leading up to 1C, the coffee beans are giving off heat because of the reactions happening inside them, but all of a sudden during 1C, the coffee become endothermic, which means they stop giving off heat and need more heat applied. This is a common place for problems to happen. If there’s not enough heat going into the beans during 1C, then the roast stalls and the coffee bakes instead of roasts and will taste gross.
Once 1C is done, you have somewhere around 15-30 seconds or so, generally, before second crack (2C) starts. This can be tricky because the start of 2C is easy to mistake as the end of 1C, and once second crack starts, it tends to go fast, so it’s easy to “roll into” 2C from 1C and even roll right through it. The sounds of 2C are less spread out, more rapid, and are softer, like loud puffs, and those sounds come from the cellulose in the structure of the coffee itself fracturing.
GENERALLY speaking, the goal for most coffee roasters should be to get your coffee through 1C and then cool it before 2C starts to happen. This gives you a so-called “city roast” just as 1C is finishing, city+ in the interim, and “full city” if you magically predict when 2C is about to happen and you cool it before that can commence. As you can imagine, if you roast a lot of the same coffee and keep decent notes of what happens at various times, you have a better idea of what will probably start to happen and when, so you will have more control and you really can start to predict when 2C is about to happen and stop it from rolling into second crack.
Coffee in the full city level will have some oil on the surface in a few days. If the coffee gets into second crack, it’s called “Vienna” roast and this will be darker and have more oil on the surface in a while. A full French roast is what happens if you take your coffee near to the end of 2C. The coffee will be pretty much covered in oil in a few days.
Roasting is all about taste, but the more you roast a coffee, the less origin characteristics you’ll get and the more carbon flavors you’ll have. Take 3 different qualities of steak and leave them all on your grill for 30 minutes and try to tell the difference when you’re eating hockey pucks! There are some merits that can be had from those coffees. They are low in fruit, have no real acidity to speak of (what gives fruity coffees their fruity flavors), tend to take milk and sugar nicely, may get come nut and chocolate flavors, but they also have a smokiness and carbon flavor that you may not care for. But, make a French roast of a single origin high altitude Colombian coffee, or a natural Ethiopian, and the differences will be minimal. If you bring these same coffees into the City, City+ or Full City range, though, you’ll retain acidity and fruitiness, complexity, and minimize the carbon blanket lying over all those flavors, and the nuances become more apparent.
It’s harder than it sounds, too! Wish me luck! In Part 2, I’ll be looking at Sweet Maria’s Espresso Monkey, which I roasted 3 ways!