Gday CSers.
Being new to home roasting, Im still learning the ropes of getting a nice roast and finding ways around the very fast roast times of my popcorn maker. I recently bought the starter pack and it had some Ethiopian Yirgacheffe. I roasted it up to what I thought was the start of SC (less than five minutes!
) and let it sit for a week. I pulled out the plunger, ground up some coffee and brewed. Oh my! What an awfully acidic tasting bean! It was terrible, almost as though I had squeezed an entire lemon into it ...
So I searched around for why coffee might be so acidic. The most common reason I found was under-roasting. So, one week after it had been initially roasted, I threw it back in the popper for a second go. A few minutes, some extra cracking and a modest amount of smoke later I pulled the beans out and cooled them. Needing to taste the results, I immediately brewed some up and I must admit I was pleasantly surprised. The acidity was way down. Ive not got much of a palate for describing tastes but it tasted much more like coffee than lemon. I suspect it needs a few days to breathe again though.
Now it would clearly be better to roast properly the first time, but has anyone else done this?
I was thinking in order to slow my coffee roasting time I might heat it to first crack, turn the popper off for a couple of minutes then fire it back up or use a cycle of on for 20s off for 20 ... Not the ideal way to control temperature but is there anything fundamentally wrong with doing this?
Being new to home roasting, Im still learning the ropes of getting a nice roast and finding ways around the very fast roast times of my popcorn maker. I recently bought the starter pack and it had some Ethiopian Yirgacheffe. I roasted it up to what I thought was the start of SC (less than five minutes!
) and let it sit for a week. I pulled out the plunger, ground up some coffee and brewed. Oh my! What an awfully acidic tasting bean! It was terrible, almost as though I had squeezed an entire lemon into it ...So I searched around for why coffee might be so acidic. The most common reason I found was under-roasting. So, one week after it had been initially roasted, I threw it back in the popper for a second go. A few minutes, some extra cracking and a modest amount of smoke later I pulled the beans out and cooled them. Needing to taste the results, I immediately brewed some up and I must admit I was pleasantly surprised. The acidity was way down. Ive not got much of a palate for describing tastes but it tasted much more like coffee than lemon. I suspect it needs a few days to breathe again though.
Now it would clearly be better to roast properly the first time, but has anyone else done this?
I was thinking in order to slow my coffee roasting time I might heat it to first crack, turn the popper off for a couple of minutes then fire it back up or use a cycle of on for 20s off for 20 ... Not the ideal way to control temperature but is there anything fundamentally wrong with doing this?


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