Last week we held a workshop on ideal roasting lenghts. We brewed espressos with coffees that had been roasted different lengths of time.
This is one of the steps that we do every time when we build a new espressoblend.
For this workshop I had roasted 3 different versions of the same coffee ten days before.
The coffee comes from the Daterra farm in Brazil and the bean we used is their “sweet yellow”.
All three samples were roasted to the same degree, just before the second crack, and were agreed by everyone to be the same roast degree.
The first sample was roasted 12 minutes, the second 13 minutes, and the third 14 minutes.
We brewed a total of 32 espressos and the conclusions as follows.
The 12 minute coffee was quite acidic, like a granny smith apple acidity. It was quite sweet, and we found nutty bitterness as well. However, everyone found it a bit violent and the mouthfeel was not that good.
The 13 minute coffee was a bit less acidic, or at least the acidity felt more integrated into the coffee being more citrus-like compared to the “granny-smith”-acidity. This roast was sweeter than the 12 minute coffee and some of us found a lot of marzipan nuances in the shots. Some of us held it as the best coffee, but for some it was still a bit violent as every component wasn´t fully integrated into the coffee. Of all the three coffees this one had the most fruitiness.
The 14 minute coffee was the sweetest coffee of all. The coffee also showed a lot of nuttiness. The acidity was the lowest, and was very well integrated into the coffee. Many found this coffee to be the best, but some thought is lacked some of the fruitiness of the 13 minute coffee, and was not that special. This was also the coffee that had the least difference between the shots we made. The other two coffees tasted more different in every shot, and can maybe therefore be more difficult to brew then the 14 minute.
Concerning the brewing method, espressos bring fort every nuance and difference in the coffee -as this test partly shows. Some do perhaps not expect the coffees to taste that different, as the coffees used were of the exactly same quality, type and roastdegree.
Thanks to everyone who joined the workshop, and hope this helped (or perhaps confused even more) everyone understand coffee better.
