Sensory Coffee Roasting: Fine-tuning Your Senses
The coffee roasting process is as sensory as it is technical. To achieve the perfect roast, coffee roasters rely on their senses just as much as they do on the coffee roasting machine. Watching the coffee beans change color, smelling the emerging aromas, listening to the cracks, and doing endless coffee cupping, these sensory cues are a part of the charm of coffee roasting and what makes the whole process so rewarding. In this post, we discuss what is sensory coffee roasting, how to use the sensory cues as your guideposts to determine the roast level, unlock the potential of your coffee beans, and how to use sensory coffee roasting to achieve your perfect flavor profile.
The Role of the Senses in Roasting
Coffee roasting is a skill that gets better with experience, and one cannot rely only on the machine. In sensory coffee roasting, coffee roasters also use their senses to determine the roast level of their coffee beans. More often than not, one sense alone is not reliable enough to determine the roast level. The best way to determine the roast level is by using all five senses when roasting coffee.
By improving their ability to correctly interpret all five senses during coffee roasting, coffee roasters can elevate the quality of their roasted coffee beans. Trained sensory skills mean an increased ability to evaluate coffee quality, identify flavors and defects, and even improve roast profiles. Furthermore, by practicing sensory coffee roasting we can improve overall roasted coffee bean quality and consistency, select more appropriate coffee for your business, and create better brew recipes.
Key Sensory Cues
1. Sight
While the coffee beans are inside the roaster machine, looking at their progression of color can be an informative tool for coffee roasters. It is important to keep an eye on the bean color, size, and surface texture, as they correspond directly to the degree of roast.
2. Smell
The volatile aromatic compounds inside the coffee bean are responsible for its aroma. This aroma shifts as soon as the coffee is roasted, and keeps changing as the roast progresses. It takes a lot of practice and training to tune in your olfactory sense with the coffee roasting process.
3. Sound
One of the first things roasters learn when they start to roast coffee is listening to the first crack and second crack. These crack sounds act as timers during the coffee roasting process, and experienced roasters should be able to discern the difference between the sounds of the first crack from the second crack.
4. Taste
Coffee cupping is obviously how a coffee roaster can evaluate the final result of their roast, and different roasts yield different flavor profiles during the cupping session. Coffee roasters often taste the roasted coffee beans after they leave the roaster machine. Chewing a post-roast bean can give an idea of what the bean will taste like when brewed later on.
5. Touch
Our sense of touch can help determine whether the coffee beans are done roasting. Coffee beans go through physical changes during roasting, from bumpy and uneven to smooth and oily.
Practical Tips for Sensory Coffee Roasting
We recommend the following tips to hone your skills for sensory coffee roasting:
Practice, practice, practice
Daily practice can help improve sensory skills and build a sensory memory bank, so you can identify flavors and aromas more accurately. You can also take some additional training to improve your sensory skills.
Make a roast log
By logging your results and recording your tasting notes, you have a point of reference on which roast profiles work for you and which ones did not go quite as planned.
Cup coffees from other roasters
To improve your sensory skills and analyze coffee objectively, buy and taste coffee beans from other roasters. By doing a cupping session on other brands, you can also rate the flavor profile, detect any roast defects, and perhaps get inspired to improve your own roast.
Roast badly on purpose
Practicing sensory cues on bad roasts can help you build your sensory memory bank on common roast defects so you can identify them easily.
Techniques and data are undoubtedly important in producing roasted coffee beans with excellent quality, but to achieve the best-tasting coffee coffee roasters also need to pay close attention to the sensory coffee roasting process. Engaging your senses is part of what makes coffee roasting so captivating – we learn how to tune our sense of smell, sight, sound, and taste to the chemical changes inside the coffee beans during the coffee roasting process. By having the machinery and our five senses work in harmony, we can achieve the best flavor profile of our roasted coffee beans.
Ready to sync in your senses during coffee roasting with Berto roaster machines? Contact us today to get personalized recommendations that suit your business needs.
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