Time for coffee and tea
Coffee roasting and blending
The act of roasting coffee beans enables the development of exquisite tastes. During the roasting process many constitutional changes occur in a coffee bean, these include a change in density and a dramatic increase in size, often to twice the original size. The green coffee bean also changes colour during the roasting process, it initially changes to a yellow co lour before turning to a brown colour familiar to people who like light coffee roasts, following further roasting the coffee bean turns into a dark colour and is oily in nature; this is a consequence of oil seeping to the coffee bean surface during the heating process.
A light coffee roast tends to keep the organic flavors of the bean intact, these flavours vary upon the environmental growth conditions of the coffee itself, for example Arabica coffees grown in Java have a very different flavor to those that are grown in Columbia because the soil types and the precipitation patterns in the two countries are very different.
A dark roasted coffee will taste very different to a lightly roasted coffee due to chemical changes that occur when the bean goes through the roasting process. There are varying degrees of dark roast with, perhaps, the French roast being the king. It is interesting how different countries view the types of roasted coffee, most european people consider american style coffee to ‘taste like piss’ whereas many American’s find the much stronger European coffee to be far too bitter for their tastes.
There are many processes that occur during the roasting of coffee. The initial stage involves cleaning the beans, this is achieved by pouring the beans into a hopper and screening to remove unwanted debris. Following cleaning the beans are then roasted at a temperature of between 365 and 545 degrees Celsius for between 5 and thirty minutes, depending upon the type of roast required.
As people throughout the world have different tastes they require different characteristics in their coffee drink. There has been much research into the types of coffee that people like best and much money is spent every year to create great tasting coffee blends. Coffee is normally blended using many different varieties of coffee from throughout the world. This enables perfect coffee flavors and aromas to be created, an additional factor when creating coffee blends is that the blend must be able to be consistently recreated to ensure that consumers are able to have a quality cup of coffee. This is not as easy as it sounds; coffee is a natural product and is susceptible to environmental impacts, this means that recipes for well known blends must be continually adjusted to keep the same well known tastes.