Science or Art?

Flip red switch to “on” position, temperature control to “high”, ensure fire extinguisher is nearby. This is how the instructions for my new in-home coffee roaster read. Great, I’m going to burn the house down because I’m too lame to buy coffee at the store. I decided to stop there and back up about 20 steps. Now that I had the equipment that could actually turn out a decent roast, I needed to match my coffee roasting skills to it. This wasn’t cave-girl and the popcorn popper anymore.

There are a few opinions about the process of roasting coffee. Some view it as science, others view it as art, and many feel there’s a mark somewhere in between. I’m definitely on the science side of the scale being the rule-follower that I am, but I think of it kind of like cooking or baking. Lots of people can follow recipes, but for some reason there are those who can pull it off to perfection, and others who make you afraid when the dinner invitation comes with the announcement “I’m trying a new recipe”. Yay for me, I’ll be sure not to come hungry.

I decided that I needed to learn the science behind the process, and then hope to develop the art on this foundation. I signed myself up for a roasting course given by my roaster’s manufacturer, Diedrich, which is one of the most highly respected names in the coffee industry. I thought I knew a few things about coffee from all I’d read and learned, like its long and twisted history, the quality and characteristics of beans from the different origins, and basically what type of roast and flavor I liked. Really, I knew next to nothing, but I guess I was much like the other 12 class attendees in the room. Many of them had coffee roasting businesses or cafés, or were about to embark on a new business venture. We all brought our own passion for the beverage and some varying knowledge, but mostly a desire to be better at understanding and roasting coffee. I was the only female in the room of men (including my husband who I dragged along as my sidekick). Apparently coffee roasting is a guy-thing (kind of like Oprah is a chick-thing….more on that another time). I was a total sponge and left the class with basic technical roasting skills, cupping (aka “tasting”) skills, and a supply chain understanding of coffee from seed to roaster. Amazing. Now I was ready to push the “on” button for that thing I’d installed in the garage.

For the next few weeks I roasted coffee a few nights a week, trying to understand the time and temperature-sensitive chemical changes of the green bean and the effect on the final roasted flavor. I hadn’t yet implemented the highly technical skill of “spitting out coffee” in my coffee tasting routine, so I was a bit like a sleep deprived, edgy and over caffeinated reality show contestant there for a while. The biggest problem was that I was producing more than two coffee drinkers in our home could consume, so to off my experiments on my journey to learning how to roast the perfect coffee, I decided I needed to share. Thankfully my neighbors and friends were accustomed to seeing me around Christmas time with homemade cookies in hand, so I didn’t feel like a complete whack handing out the coffee door to door a couple months later. I packed up little half-pound bags in my son’s brown paper lunch sacs and started walking around the ‘hood handing them out like a drug dealer trying to hook some new clients. I brought bags to my office, and sent some along with my husband to his office every week.

What I learned from these brave coffee testers was amazing and unexpected, and was the dot that my “I want to run my own business” line was looking to connect with. That dot was coffee.