Are You Roasting for Competitions or Roasting for Your Customers?
This week, a new client sent me some coffee for an audit to define a possible training course concept and direction. I’ve been cupping and sending over feedback—my view of what I see in the roasts, what the potential problems might be, and what I would pay attention to.
I left one specific comment, and she immediately said: “I had no idea that it matters. I have never looked at it that way before.”
The comment was about how the coffee behaves when it cools down. How long it lasts, if it lasts, what is happening to it when it is cold, what is changing, and what is prevailing. The evolution of coffee with temperature.
It is one of the few aspects that usually gets overlooked when profiling coffee, and it makes a huge difference. Another one is fragrance and aroma.
Recently, Map It Forward launched a new series with the amazing Isabela Raposeiras—100% worth listening to for many reasons, especially for how she is changing the narrative of the 6-1 workweek to a 4-3 workweek in Brazil, and questioning the value proposition of specialty coffee. Among other things, she mentioned our current obsession with fragrance and aroma in roasting and brewing.
In specialty cafés, when you order a V60, most probably you’ll be served a carafe and suggested to appreciate the gentle aroma from the server before actually taking your first sip. Although it is part of the experience, these aromas are usually quite volatile. Within 3 to 5 minutes, you probably won't pick them up anymore.
Then you’re left with a full server of coffee, and what actually matters is what’s inside it, and how it cools down.
If you want to test it yourself, prepare cupping, wait 20 minutes until it’s completely cold, and taste it. Does the sweetness mantain or is it vanishing? Does the acidity stay juicy, or is it replaced by a dry, hollow, and greenish? If this happens, the roast was focused on chasing those volatile aromas that won't even last 3 minutes in a customer's cup, and sacrificed the rest.
Actually, I don’t think I pay that much attention to fragrance and aroma while evaluating coffee anymore, even during a cupping. Of course it is extra information, and it is better to have it, but it won’t tell me nearly as much as drinking the coffee will. Even worse, it can be misleading if I pick up on something on the nose and remain hyper-focused on it during the rest of the tasting.
Even when teaching cupping for scores using the SCA or CVA forms, I usually suggest treating fragrance and aroma as a promise that the coffee is giving you. But will it keep it? You're gonna find out when tasting.
Are you roasting for your clients or for a competition?
Those are very different roasts, and you will want to showcase completely different aspects of the coffee.
My position regarding production roasting can be summarized in one sentence: the roast must be bulletproof. Aka, it should be easily extractable.
Take into consideration that every roaster, as a rule, roasts for the water they taste coffee with—the water they are using in their own lab to do quality control. And they roast for the water of their specific region, which is also constantly fluctuating. Sometimes water in one area of the city is better than in another, and it changes throughout the year—after floods, after periods of heavy rain, etc.
The roaster is roasting for the lab water and the regional water. This is one more reason to buy coffee from your local specialty coffee roasters, by the way, the same way you don’t order bread from a foreign country. You will just have less trouble adjusting the brewing recipe if they are roasting for the exact same water you have.
Making your roasts bulletproof
If you are a roaster and you are planning to grow your business, your roasts should be bulletproof. What do I mean by that?
Your grandmother should be able to buy a bag of your coffee, make it at home with whatever equipment she has, and it should come out tasty.
Your friend who does not know anything about coffee, and definitely will not be buying special bottled water to brew it, should be able to make a V60 with a simple 2-3 pour recipe, and the coffee should turn out tasty.
This might sound outrageous to an industry that grows because we are constantly buying new tools and gadgets to play with, but if you are running a roasting business, your goal is different. You are doing the heavy lifting. You should make coffee extraction as easy and as good as possible for the end consumer. Some companies even go as far as making coffee in a can or using drip bags—doing everything possible to eliminate the steps where your customer can make a mistake.
It’s about eliminating the steps where the buyer can get it wrong. It means getting ready for “bad” water, for people brewing without scales, brewing with channeling, or not measuring the amount of water they use and just doing it by eye.
Test how good your coffee is when done this way. Give it to a friend who makes a moka pot at home, and see how it holds up. Go to a friend who has a super-automatic bean-to-cup machine. How good does it taste when done that simply?
Our issue, as professionals, is that we are always in danger of getting completely disconnected from reality.
The truth is, if your coffee tastes good only under very specific circumstances—with very specific water, a professional barista making it, on very specific equipment—you are roasting for narrow conditions that won’t be replicated out in the wild. Very few people will be able to enjoy the coffee the way you designed it, and those are probably just the friends you invited over to your house.
The battle for coffee extraction
The other way of seeing roasting is as preparing coffee to be consumed and enjoyed by a very wide audience of non-professionals. Professionals will always know what to do with your coffee; they will tweak the recipe to get even more out of it. You, as a roaster, should take care of those who won’t, and focus on roasting for solubility.
There is no worse feeling—at least for me when I am buying a bag of coffee to try at home—than battling for extraction.
I usually brew all new coffees using the exact same preparation method, which only varies depending on the filters I bought (I switch between a V60, Origami, and AeroPress). The grind on my Lido 2 is always the same; I never change it. The recipe is the same, and the ratio is the same. I have some benchmark roasters who I know are roasting for solubility, and my home recipe is adjusted to their coffee. I use bottled water with around 40 ppm if I feel fancy, but regular tap water in my area is also surprisingly clean and good. I test all other coffees by comparing them to that specific benchmark of solubility.
I only vary the pours depending on the processing—one pattern for washed and regular naturals, and another pattern for natural anaerobic and other modern experimental processing.
And if I see that the V60 is getting clogged, if I see that the coffee is not being extracted, or if it requires extra movements from my part—I feel that the roaster passed the job of doing the heavy lifting onto me. They did it halfway, and then left me to dial it in, jump through hoops, and hunt for the missing pieces of the puzzle.
I can do it because I know how. But how many of your customers can't?
How many customers will simply never buy from that roaster again because the results at home were sour and unsatisfying? And how many will walk away stuck with the permanent idea that specialty coffee is just this: a hard-to-extract, sour substance?
