We’ve umm’d & arh’d a lot this week over this roast, having worked our way through numerous iterations. We’re pretty close now to having the espresso edition agreed, we think it just needs to go a fraction or two darker. Two more test roasts and we should have an answer. Have an enjoyable time seeing the New Year in later today.
We’ve used a couple of the Bodum Antigua grinders to death in the past. The quality is variable, with some seeming to fail after 12 months, but the two units we had just kept on going for years, with the burrs gradually wearing smooth. Not good enough for espresso use, but they give you a ticket to top quality coffee, namely buying fresh and correctly roasted whole bean coffee.
a curious discovery this morning – i found the Java Semeru robusta makes a really good cup of filter coffee through the Swissgold filter. All we have to do now is get out to the roastery and perform some more test roasts to get the espresso edition up to speed
We’re quite surprised with how easily the oil comes to the surface of the bean. We want to roast another test sample and try roasting this bean significantly less and see what it tastes like.
We want to try roasting the Daterra Monte Cristo fractionally darker to see if we can dampen the acidity slightly and round out the taste to give more balance and fullness
We’ve roasted a test roast of the Java Semeru robusta, and hope to get a chance to run it through the espresso machine during a break in the festivities tomorrow. In fact we’ll probably schedule it early in the day before our tasted buds become swamped with the over indulgence that generally seems to accompany Christmas day in this house. If we can we will try and roast it even lighter than the current middle of the road starting point that we like to use when roasting a coffee that we have little previous experience of for the first time. The predominant taste in this coffee is a very pleasant taste of hazelnuts.
We’ve been working on roasting the newly received Daterra Monte Cristo. Call us heretics, but we are pleased to tell you that it is still shipped in a conventional, environmentally friendly, jute bag. This is significant as a great number of the Daterra coffees now ship in vacuum packed foil bags, and the trend is being popularised by many of the participants in the Cup of Excellence program as being indicative of a carefully controlled, high quality, coffee. Whilst this gives a good result for filter coffee, cappuccinos and lattes, the foil packaging drastically slows the aging of the green bean and as a result the acidity really is far too dominant and overbearing to be our first choice for espresso. We have a revised test roast to sample tomorrow, Christmas morning, and expect to be get pretty close to a result that would allow us to release the coffee for sale.
Yes, you read that correctly. We’ve been looking around for a great robusta to offer you as a singel origin espresso for a long time. So great that you can enjoy it as a single origin espresso with a grin from ear to ear & serve it to your friends to prove a point when they laugh with derision at the suggestion of 100% robusta being fit to drink.
The standard roast sample we received from the broker was as black as soot, in line with conventional wisdom on how to treat your favourite robusta. We gave our green bean sample an easier ride and roasted it a lot lighter, probably swinging the pendulum a little too far the other way, but we had to start somewhere and succeeded in bringing out the hazelnut tones we were looking for.
The big lesson we’ve learned is to give it more time than the arabica coffees to round out and fully develop after roasting; it is coarse and wooden immediately after roasting.
We’ve ordered some and as soon as it arrives we’ll work on optimising the roast for you as we’ve a few ideas we want to experiment with prior to offering for sale.
Our 100% robusta single origin is ideal for a kick start to get into your work on these cold dark mornings that have enveloped us in the northern hemisphere.
And yes, if you are a closet milkie, it makes a very pleasant cappuccino too.
If you are considering purchasing an Olympia machine, prices will be rising on 1 January 2010 by the amount of the increase in VAT from 15% to 17.5%
Margins on Olympia products are under considerable pressure as the Sterling has weakened significantly against the Swiss Franc over the last couple of years, during which time we have held the prices. As a result we are unable to absorb the rise in VAT on 1 Jan 2010.
