What are you looking for in a particular coffee? Do you want a sweeter coffee? A brighter one? Are you roasting for espresso and would like more body and lower acidity? All of these characteristics can be altered through roast development, specifically by altering the length of time of certain parts of the roast. In the first part of this article, we'll look at stretching out the time after the end of 1st Crack and see if it has a tastable impact on the perceived acidity due to the breakdown of acids and compounds.
I wanted to share the Stretchin' Out the Roast series with the Shrub crowd here and see if we could get some discussion going on these topics. One question that I have left after all these experiments and tastings is whether there is a difference to be found in the cup between stretching out the drying stage and stretching out the time before 1st Crack after the Malliard Reaction has started. I'm looking at doing a part 4, but if the findings are inconclusive I'll probably just note that in the comments of Part 3.
In February the harvest is well underway in Central America. New coffees from CA are still a couple months away and it is increasingly harder to find coffees from last year's crops that don't show age. It is the time of year to take a close look at your CA coffees from last year, if you still have some. We've been looking at coffees both on the offerings list as well as coffees that we haven't yet offered in order to check for faded cups and age characteristics.
