Good morning! It has been a while since I checked in about coffee roasting, and the reason is this was a REALLY challenging coffee for me and it took me a while to appreciate it, so without further ado, let’s see what happened with this Guatemalan peaberry I roasted!
Part 2: Espresso Monkey Three Ways
Part 3: Single Origin Colombian
Guatemala Proyecto Xinabajul Peaberry
SWEET MARIA’S GUATEMALA PROYECTO XINABAJUL PEABERRY
After 6 successful batches of two coffees using Sweet Maria’s Espresso Monkey and a single origin Colombian from San Antonio Palomos del Sur, I was feeling pretty good about myself going into this Guatemalan coffee. All the previous were drinkable, if not downright tasty, so I was riding high. This coffee, which is sold out at Sweet Maria’s (but, they are CONSTANTLY rotating in great coffees, so the choices are almost endless), was described as, “Molasses, creme brulee crust, crisp toffee and the like, bittersweet cacao nibs, dried currant and a hint of green tea. A true crowd pleaser” so I was super excited to tear into this.
I’m not even going to dive deep into my roasting processes for this one because I was essentially roasting blind on this one. My Behmor 1600 is the OG Behmor roaster with no fancy frills and I am not about to start drilling holes in it for temperature probes and the like. I am somewhat DIY in that way, but electronics never work right for me and I don’t want to ruin my roaster. Anyway, I couldn’t get ANY sounds out of this coffee during roasting, so it was a total guessing game.
Normally in coffee roasting you go through a variety of stages where the beans yellow, then the Maillard reaction starts they turn brown, and then you hit first crack. First crack is a literal cracking/popping sound a lot like popcorn popping. This happens when the cell walls of the coffee have broken down and there is cellular expansion going on and it creates this audible sound. For the most part, coffee needs to get into first crack to be palatable to drink, and the majority of specialty coffee roasters continue to develop the coffee for a little bit after first crack. Eventually, you run into second crack, which is another series of popping sounds (usually somewhat quieter and faster). Most specialty roasters stop the roast well before second crack starts occurring, but you can go past second crack and that’s when the beans get oily looking and you’re in French and Italian roast territory (aka nuked).
Professional roasters use a variety of temperature probes and a computer hooked up to these probes to measure things like drum temperature, air temperature and the temp of the coffee bed itself in the roaster. All of these things are mapped and plotted on graphs by the computer software and a visual roasting profile can be seen by the roaster, so they know the rate and rise of the temperature of the beans, the exact temperature when first crack happened, they can see if anything caused a dip in the temperature, which usually results in some weird flavors, etc. Once they’re happy with their profile for a coffee, they can roast subsequent batches against this profile and make adjustments as they go to try to follow that curve.
My Behmor has none of that.
So, I’ve been roasting and listening for first crack, then trying to get to second crack and noting the times and my machine setup so I at least have an idea of when 1C and 2C happen and I can try to land somewhere in between them. This worked awesome with the Espresso Monkey and Colombian coffees, but since I had no sounds out of this Guatemalan coffee, I was roasting completely blind.
I’m not sure why I couldn’t get any sounds out of it. One possibility is that I didn’t ever make it to first crack with my three roasts, but I highly doubt that as I was using the same settings as I used for all the other roasts and those could get to 2C without any trouble if I had wanted to. I think you can get diminished sounds if the coffee is pretty old, for example, I have to 5 year old green coffee that doesn’t crack, but Sweet Maria’s doesn’t sell coffee like that and are reputable, so they aren’t finding dusty bags in the back of some warehouse and trying to ressurect them. Beyond that, I’m not sure what the science is behind coffees that don’t crack, so if you know, leave comments!
In any case, this peaberry didn’t crack, but, visually, my three batches all look like solidly medium roasts. Oh, peaberries are the name for circular, sometimes American football shaped coffee beans that don’t have that flat on one side, domed on the other look of normal beans. In most coffee cherries, there are two seeds (what we call coffee beans). As the seeds grow, they press against one another, which creates the flat surface of a normal coffee bean. There is a mutation in coffee plants that causes only one seed to be present, and as you can imagine if there’s only one seed inside the coffee cherry, it doesn’t press up against another seed, so it is round in shape. Peaberries tend to be pretty small, too, and these ones were about 25-30% of the size of a regular coffee bean. Super cute!
I did a few espresso shots and pourovers of each of my peaberry batches and they were all acid bombs… super bright, very lemon forward, not undrinkable by any stretch but with none of the qualities descrived by Sweet Maria’s. These were hot, unbalanced, acid-forward coffees and I pretty much chalked it up as a loss. A few weeks later I was looking at my coffee area in the kitchen and just had a mess of bags and little bits of this and that everywhere, so I got the bright idea of blending some of these coffees and pulling shots and this turned out to be both very fun and yield surprisingly good results!
This is where this peaberry shined. I tried all kinds of blends in this experimental phase but was usually using 3-5 grams of Moka Sirs Pregiato blend (which I’ve had in the freezer and it has been great coming out). This bad boy is 30% robusta, so I was using some of that for the GORGEOUS crema it makes, then mixing in other blends, other single origins, whatever, to get to 18g of coffee. I found this Guatemalan peaberry to be too acid-forward by itself, but in a blend, it was nice. The lemon notes and the overall brightness came through, especially when I was using more of the Pregiato blend, which is a traditional Italian style espresso with lots of roasty notes, but it wasn’t overwhelming at all. I’ve never really played around with coffee this way, but I was really having a good time, adding more of this natural to get more fruity notes and more of the peaberry to bring up the high end and balance the roasty notes of the base coffee, etc. It did great like that! I was stoked to find a use for this coffee, and I’ve subsequently used up that whole pound of coffee that, otherwise, would have sat on my counter until the guilt was overwhelming and I’d have to trash it, something I am very against doing because it’s nothing short of a miracle that coffee even makes it to our shores in the USA, not to mention into my stomach.