I Should Be Golden

So, I'm sitting here sipping my morning brew. Nope, it's not time for my heat gun/bread machine beans yet. Today it's all about Ethiopian Horse Harar Lot #19. I roasted 3 separate small batches, with one of them being almost (but not quite) a Vienna roast, one to what I would call city+, and the third as a full city. I mixed the three together, thus creating a mélange.  

It's one of those beans that tastes a whole lot different, depending on the level of roast, and I like hints of all of the possibilities in my cup. At day three, it has a bit of that funky smell and taste I've come to associate with this bean. Tomorrow, four days from roasting, that part will mostly be gone. It will still be wonderful, just in a different way.

Such is the lifecycle of craft roasted beans.

This is not a bean I roast and send out as gifts, not on its own, unless I already know that it will be well received. It's much "safer" to make a person's first introduction to home roasted beans a bit tamer. I do though sneak a bit of it in with something more predictable, and at about 25% of a  blend, it adds a certain oomph.

There's an interesting article in the NY Times about the health benefits of coffee. It's not, btw, a caffeine thing.

From the article:

Larger quantities of coffee seem to be especially helpful in diabetes prevention. In a report that combined statistical data from many studies, researchers found that people who drank four to six cups of coffee a day had a 28 percent reduced risk compared with people who drank two or fewer. Those who drank more than six had a 35 percent risk reduction.

Some studies show that cardiovascular risk also decreases with coffee consumption. Using data on more than 27,000 women ages 55 to 69 in the Iowa Women’s Health Study who were followed for 15 years, Norwegian researchers found that women who drank one to three cups a day reduced their risk of cardiovascular disease by 24 percent compared with those drinking no coffee at all.

But as the quantity increased, the benefit decreased. At more than six cups a day, the risk was not significantly reduced. Still, after controlling for age, smoking and alcohol consumption, women who drank one to five cups a day — caffeinated or decaffeinated — reduced their risk of death from all causes during the study by 15 to 19 percent compared with those who drank none.

I should be golden, right?

 

posted by taming at 06:09 | link | comments (2)|
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Bread Machine/Heat Gun Coffee Roasting

I took my bread machine out of retirement today. It had been in a closet since September 2004, when I began eating low carb. Nope, I didn't fall off the wagon. I converted my trusty old friend into a coffee making tool.

Now, lots of people roast coffee using a heat gun and a dog bowl, but I didn't want to have to stir the beans—thus enters the bread machine. In case you think I am inventive, I'm not. There are other people doing this strange thing, and none of them are any crazier than I am, which may not be saying much.

In any case, this is what you need to join me in this venture:

• a bread machine (mine is a cheap Sunbeam, the kind you find in every thrift store on the planet);
• a heat gun with a high and a low speed ($34 Canadian in the paint aisle of the hardware store);
• some sort of pot holder or protective gear so you don't burn your hand when you lift the bread machine bucket;
• a fan, or some other cooling device, topped with a metal strainer or colander; and,
• green beans. I used 3/4 of a pound, and probably could have done a full pound.

This is my bread machine, out on the patio, on top of the beer fridge. That's my $34 heat gun along side of it The brown speckles are chaff, the papery substance that flies off the coffee beans during roasting. A piece of chaff occasionally catches fire as you do this. It looks a little like a mosquito as it comes in contact with a bug zapper. It took about 8 minutes to reach first crack, and wowie kazowie, you really can hear it pop. Waaaay different than my iRoast2. I stopped the roast 2 minutes after first crack ended, before second crack. Roasting 3/4 of a pound of beans is a smoky affair, but there was a nice breeze and the smoke didn't bother me at all. You would not want to do this indoors, unless you had one heck of an exhaust fan going right over the beans.

>

This is my cooling device. I grabbed a fan from inside, turned it on high, and placed a strainer on top of it. Any chaff that had not flown out whilst roasting exited during the cooling off period. The beans were entirely cool in 90 seconds. I held the strainer a bit above the fan and shook the beans back and forth to aid in the mixing and reduce the cooling time.

 

Ta Daa. These are the finished coffee beans. The white splotch in the corner is my ovglove. It's made of kevlar and comes in handy when you BBQ or have to take hot pans out of the stove. I used it to grab the very hot handle of the bread machine bucket when I needed to transfer the beans to the strainer for cooling. The roast is a little bit uneven, but not bad. I am pretty sure that I'll be able to get a more even roast with practice. I'd call it a City +/almost Full City, a good solid medium roast, which is where I was trying to take these particular beans.

Edit: When I took the beans indoors and looked at them in indoor light, the roast looked much more even, as even as anything I ever get out of my IR2, at least.  Damn sunbeams.

I couldn't roast like this when it is forty below here, but it seems to be a great way to roast in good weather, and it sure is great to be able to do a bigger batch from time to time. I'll rest the beans for a few days, and tell you how they turned out.

 

posted by taming at 15:13 | link | comments (5)|
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The Pusher Amongst You

Yup, still here, still roasting and drinking coffee. It's been a busy, busy time in my normally unbusy life.

Today I'm drinking Guatemalan Antigua Peaberry. Yesterday was something else, and, as I am making coffee for a dinner party tonight and using up the remains of this bean, I'll have something else tomorrow morning. I don't think I have had the same coffee more than five days in a row since I started roasting. Home roast being what it is, even when we are using the same bean, from the same batch, each day the coffee tastes slightly different, as the flavours change (sometimes dramatically) as the beans rest.

Heck, with home roast, the coffee tastes different as it sits in the cup and cools a tad.

We homeroasters are an adventurous lot. Our parents may have opened a can of Folgers or Maxwell House and delighted in the familiar taste of their morning brew, but that's not for us. Our brothers and sisters may go into Charbucks and play eenie miney moe with whatever over roasted bean they are featuring that day, but that is not for us, either.

Nope, we are the ones with a closet full of greenies and a sense of adventure. We may never visit India, Sumatra, Kenya, or Brazil, but we can roast, brew, and drink coffee from these exotic places.

It's like a secret club. Our goal is not only to drink the best damn coffee in the world, but to bring others over to the dark side as well. We may not stand on street corners with glassine envelopes of white powder in our pockets, but we are, none the less, pushers. Chances are, if you like coffee, and know one of us homeroasters,  the day will come when you are handed a small bag with some of our "product". 

This is not an innocent act. Make no mistake about this, we are not only attempting to do a stash reduction, so we can go ahead and order even more beans without being hollered at by our non-roasting spouses, we are shamelessly trying to create new addicts.

If you are not impressed with our beans, we mutter something about "pearls before swine" and move on to the next unsuspecting mark.

 

posted by taming at 07:18 | link | comments (2)|
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