burnt Yemeni

I should have paid more attention to what they were telling me on Sweet Maria's website concerning the Nesco roaster. As long as the beans stay hot, they are going to cook. Since the internal temperature of the coffee bean needs to heat up to around 400 degrees before it is officially roasted, coffee roasters are all about heating things up and, sometimes when you play with fire, you end up getting burnt coffee. Not paying attention to how much heat you are putting into the bean can lead to some rather nasty results. Instead of a nice cup of joe, with earthy fruit accents you get a cup of charcoal that may be hard to finish.

The key to a good roast is knowing when to stop and I learned this the hard way the other week. Unlike the fancy schmancy industrial type roasters, that I can only fantasize about, my little Nesco "Professional" roaster does not have a contraption to immediately release the beans from the heat. Instead, it goes through a cooling spin cycle of sorts, that helps slows the cooking of the beans, but does not do enough to stop it. Once the rapid spin cooling cycle finishes, you are supposed to wait another five minutes before you attempt to handle the roasting chamber, despite the convenient handle available. The people at Sweet Marias or, "SM" as they liked to be called tell you to ignore those directions and remove the beans immediately, despite the risks of getting a little scorched.

"Those beans are still cooking in that hot ass chamber!" they exclaim in so many words, and I should have paid heed to the people who seem to know everything there is to know about coffee. But no, instead I let the beans sit in the chamber, and then forgot about them for twenty minutes as a fiddled around on the Web. I had orignally set the roasting time to 25, which will generally give me a nice full city roast, but my lack of due diligence tacked on a few more minutes onto the Yemen Mokha Sharasi, putting it in the full blow Vienna category.

Now some coffee' such as the aged Sumatra and Monsooned Malabar, taste pretty good on the darker, shinier side, but this is defintely not the case with the Yemen. At least, in my opinion its not (the label says otherwise). This overly dark coffee tasted like a cup full of charcoal to me and finishing a cup took some doing. Okay, so I guess I really did not burn all that much, since I did finish the batch, but I was still peeved that I did not get what I was looking for. Next time, I swear I am going to remove the beans as soon as they are done.