Coffee roasting brings out desired traits in beans before they reach consumers. Different roast profiles determine how long and under what conditions beans are roasted. Green coffee is more stable than roasted coffee and waiting to roast allows for a complex chemical profile. Roasting can be done in various ways, leading to different flavor profiles.
Coffee roasting is a step in coffee processing that is designed to bring out certain traits in the beans. Roasting is the last step before the coffee reaches the consumer, and some consumers actually do their own roasting to have more control over their coffee. There are different ways in which coffee beans can be roasted and there are different so-called “roast profiles” which determine how long the beans are roasted and under what conditions.
Upon harvest, raw coffee must undergo some processing, including drying and removing the hulls before it is suitable for roasting. Once raw coffee has been ground, hulled, polished, cleaned and sorted, it is known as green coffee. The green coffee is ready for roasting, but roasting doesn’t necessarily happen immediately.
There are several reasons to wait for the coffee to be roasted. The first is that green coffee is more stable than roasted coffee. For transit, it makes sense to keep the coffee green because it’s less likely to be damaged, and roast as close to the consumer as possible so the coffee maintains the complex chemical profile that makes it such a popular beverage. As people who have consumed old roast coffee know, coffee loses a lot of its flavor if it’s allowed to sit too long.
The other reason to wait for the coffee to roast is that the flavor profile of the coffee varies depending on how long it has been roasted after processing. Some people agree that green coffee peaks at about a year of maturation, after which it begins to lose the oils that give coffee its aroma. Others can age coffee much longer, for seven or eight years. People have acquired a taste for coffee that has been aged before roasting and may not like the flavor of unused roasted coffee.
In the coffee roasting process, the beans are essentially roasted. Roasted coffee is often graded by color, from light to dark roasts, based on how dark the beans get. Roasting can be done in a coffee-spinning roaster, on roasting beds, and in other types of roasters, depending on the producer’s preferences. Depending on how long the beans have been roasted and the temperature, different traits will develop in the bean, leading to a radically different flavor profile when the coffee is brewed.
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