Okay, so now it’s time for a little bit of info on HOW we roast, and what sets us apart from many of the
other micro-roasters out there. Anyone can turn coffee brown…you could put a bunch of coffee beans in your oven at home and do it yourself, but you’re not going to get the most flavor from that bean doing it that way….but we use some of the most advanced equipment and processes available to bring out the natural flavor of the beans. This gives the drinker a unique experience when he/she has a cup of OUR coffee.
Our goal, with each load that we roast, is to bring out the best flavor from every bean.We don’t add any flavors or syrup to the beans to put flavors into the coffee. We simply roast to bring out the natural flavors that already exist within each coffee.
All of our coffee is craft roasted, manually, to ensure consistency from roast to roast. If someone has a cup of our Guatemalan coffee this week, we want to make certain that he/she gets the same flavor from another cup of our Guatemalan in 6 months.
At CRCR we use a drum roaster (built by Diedrich manufacturing in Sandpoint, Idaho).
This is a 12 Kilo machine which gives us the capacity to put out approximately 20lbs. of coffee per load.
The beans are poured into the funnel atop the roaster, and then dropped into the drum. Heat is applied via 2 infared burners that run the length of the drum, underneath, on both sides. This applies even heat to the entire rotating drum at all times. Two cast-steel “heat exchangers” cover the uppermost area of the drum to catch the heat that radiates off the roasting drum and push it back onto the drum and into the roasting chamber. All of these things ensure even heat to all areas of the roasting chamber at all times. The beans are constantly tumbling, never resting in one spot (and potentially scorching). In addition to the conductive heat from the burners, we use convective heat (by controlling the airflow though the drum) to penetrate to the core of the coffee bean, and cook the inside as well as the outside.
All of these things are managed manually by the Roastmaster. Our software allows for a totally automatic roasting process, but we choose NOT to use this option.
I could go on and on about this, but I think I’ll lose many of you if I do, so let me move on….
Each load takes between 15-18 minutes. There are a number of factors that decide how long each load goes, including:
-Origin of the coffee
-Elevation at which the coffee was grown
-Moisture content inside the bean
-Density of the bean (harder beans require different methods to get the heat into the core)
-Airflow inside the drum
-Degree of roast (how dark do we need to get the bean to bring forward the most flavor)
-Size of the load (how much coffee is in the drum-5lbs will roast completely different than 20 lbs)
-Atmospheric issues (outside temperature, wind, humidity)
Each of these factors is taken into account for every load that goes though our machine to achieve our ultimate goal…..WE WANT YOU TO TASTE THE WONDERFUL NATURAL FLAVORS EACH COFFEE POSSESSES!
Just a quick note on the degree of roast: We WILL NOT burn our coffee! Many other coffee companies, including several microroasters, believe that the darker the bean, the better….we find this to be ridiculous. Darker will get you flavor, for sure, but do you really want that flavor to be “charcoal?” We want, no, we need our clients to taste the wonderful properties that our coffees have to offer.