On Roasting

In Cape Town, South Africa I used to frequent a local coffee roaster, Rosetta, which was then located in the up-and-coming area of Woodstock under heavy gentrification. Former factories were being transformed into highly sought after locations for small, artisanal businesses from gin distilleries, food establishments, leather craftworkers to coffee roasters and shops. Finding parking here was always tricky, but going to Rosetta was certainly worth the ritualized frustration of seeing an ideal spot taken by someone who cut you off just a few blocks prior. 

Stepping out of the car, you’d be lucky if you caught a faint whiff of the toast; the curious smell of the air exhausted by a coffee roaster. I’d get particularly excited because it meant that, instead of reading my book, I’d have the opportunity to witness the operations of a roastery at work. 

First, the green beans are weighed out, then they’re fed into the roaster where for about 10 minutes the person operating the machine would stare at a computer screen tracking the roast profile, when suddenly they’d pull open the roaster’s door and release the coffees from the chamber into the cooling tray. While this routine was repeated throughout the hour that I was there, in the corner of the room was another person applying labels to bags into which they’d pack the freshly roasted coffee. 

Being able to watch all of this unfold through the glass partition that separated the roastery from the cafe, while taking my time drinking a pour-over, felt as though I was living through an episode of ‘How Things Are Made’ with my own thoughts providing the commentary. “What’s on the computer screen?”, “Why do some roasts take slightly longer than others?”, “How can I learn to do this?”, and most importantly: “What kind of music is the roaster listening to?”

First crack, fire alarms, and other roasting terminology

I worked as a barista for a number of years. For the most part, I really loved it. It’s probably a cliché at this point, but working as a barista really reinforces the values of community; of building relationships with regulars, your colleagues, and if you’re lucky enough (or serious enough about the industry) you might make life-long friends. It’s also a great way to get free coffee every day. 

The work, however, is routine. It demands a certain kind of focus in becoming proficient at repetitive work for the purposes of consistency and quality which can, over time, yield an experience of the days blurring into each other. It starts early if you’re opening – cleaning up leaking trashbags of slightly sour milk day in and day out becomes less funny – and having to deal with equipment malfunctioning from time to time takes its toll. 

This is part of the job, no doubt, but for some of us the mystery that shrouds the process of roasting, and those who roast the coffees that we serve, slowly begins to feel like a possible route to stay in the industry, but with a little less time in coffee shops. If management is not the path to take, then for most baristas a move to roasting, or working in a roastery, seems like the next step in our perceived ‘upwards’ trajectory. 

I say ‘upwards’ in quotation because one learns very quickly that it’s not a step up, but rather a step across, so to speak. The move from barista to roaster is not necessarily on the same path for the simple reason that not every coffee shop has a roastery; and job prospects at roasteries are few and far between. Like the person who starts out as a dishwasher in a restaurant hoping to become a line cook, most roasteries offer those with no roasting experience packing and fulfillment positions, much like the person I saw at Rosetta applying labels. The hope is that one day someone will teach you; and one day, you’ll fulfill that coveted, rare role of production roaster at such-and-such a place. 

With vacancies at roasteries being scarce, those of us wanting to undertake a journey to roasting are left with few options.

One: we can patiently wait for an opening somewhere and put our names in the lottery of job applications. Two: you take a roasting course in the hopes that it would boost your resume appeal alongside reading books written by Scott Rao. Or, three: you take the path of purchasing a small roaster to use at home while learning from Scott Rao’s books, all the while hoping that you don’t trigger the fire alarms enough to bother your neighbor. 

While I had the fortune to work at a coffee shop with its own roastery, both the positions of roaster and packer were occupied. In the hopes of one day working there, I took the third path available to me and bought myself a small, 400g roaster powered by a butane gas canister and a portable stove. With Rao’s Companion to Roasting in my possession, and some green beans on hand from Ethiopia, I thought to myself, “What could go wrong?”

Well, very little did go wrong in the grand scheme of life. Aside from a few burnt batches of coffee, triggering the fire alarm one time too many, or accidentally touching the coffee as it came out of a 400°F vessel, and Anna, my partner, constantly finding coffee beans in her shoes and chaff flying through the apartment, this small roaster will forever remind me of my first steps into roasting. Soon, I was delving into the technical aspects of the craft; learning new terms like ‘charge’¹; ‘turning point’²; Maillard reaction’³; ‘rate of rise’⁴; and most famously: ‘first crack’⁵.

This was a fun period, and for the first time I was able to brew coffee at home that I had roasted. And to challenge myself further, I formed a pact to not purchase any bags of coffee until I was happy with what I could roast (needless to say, there were a few months of bad coffee at home!).

Equipping myself with some roasting terminology and sharing my coffees with friends and colleagues, I had embarked on not only a journey to first crack, but also towards Preface. Before long, an opportunity came up to join the roasting team of the coffee shop where I was working. Soon, my Sundays and Mondays changed from making espressos and drip coffee and weighing roasted coffees in grams to weighing and hoisting green and roasted coffee around in pounds. The equipment and scales were much bigger; the sound of grinders and customers talking was replaced by the loud whirring of the roaster or beans falling into the weigh-fill machine. I had finally completed my first chapter to first crack. 

Solitude, doubt, and responsibility

I recall the text from the owner of the business offering me a chance to roast. “Production roasting is a solitary endeavor. Baristas who tend to see roasting as the ‘next step’ very quickly realize that production roasting is not as glamorous as they think it is. They tend to miss the chatter of the cafe with customers and clients, and the easier feedback loop from customers. It’s physically demanding, but the rewards of getting through a big day are satisfying.”

Looking back, I’m supremely grateful for his words that provided a small dose of reality; it took the glossy perception I had of roasting right off. It’s repetitive work, much like a barista’s job, but this time it’s just you, green coffee, and a big machine. Yet what dawned on me is the cost involved in roasting, and the monetary costs involved in making a mistake with 30 lbs of coffee. And because it’s solitary work, any faults in quality detected while cupping or complaints from wholesale clients and customers were easily traced back to me. 

If you’re anything like me, I find cooking for people an incredibly vulnerable experience. Seeing a friend that you’ve invited over pushing their food around on their plate, clearly not enjoying it, makes me anxious. It often feels like our shared history of friendship goes out the window at that moment, and the only thing I see before me is a food critic waiting to comment on my cooking to others.

I feel a similar way about roasting coffee; while there is a certain kind of freedom in roasting coffee that is stylistically my own, it does bring with it a heavy sense of doubt begging the question, “Well, what if no one likes it?”

“But what if someone does?” I offer as a counterpoint to myself. 

Roasting is hard work. On the one hand, you’re frequently lifting and moving large quantities of coffee around throughout any given day. You’re dealing with large numbers and large pieces of equipment. On the other hand, the difference between roasted coffee that is average, or good, or excellent is often found in the most minute details: a few degrees cooler, or 30 seconds longer. Roasters sweat because of moving heavy containers next to a hot machine; and we sweat over the smallest of details seeking that extra few percent improvement in our coffees.

It’s in these micro-improvements that those feelings of doubt transform into joy; where those times of solitude become a platform upon which to share the coffee with others; and where the responsibility causes less trepidation and more motivation. 

Preface and tiny pleasures

Preface is the culmination of my journey so far – from the smell of coffee roasting in Cape Town, to fire alarms going off in my apartment, to my first production roasting job. The added challenge with being a business owner and roaster is that alongside roasting coffees that are well balanced in flavor, I also have to balance the books. So often it is easy for me to get caught up in ‘big picture’ concerns – which are, no doubt, important – such as business strategy or forecasting green coffee inventory, that I have to remind myself of the central crux of Preface: the tiny pleasure that a cup of coffee is. 

Yes, roasting can be technical or physically demanding but its laced with alcoves of tiny pleasures that are so often unexpected; cupping a coffee you’ve never had before, only to fall in love it at first taste; opening the box that contains your first shipment of packaging, and holding in your hands what you’ve held in your mind for so long; seeing the first order come through on the website. 

I’m excited for the journey ahead, and I’m thrilled to have you, reader, as an important part of it. 

Footnotes

1 Charge: The term used to drop the coffee into the drum of the roaster.

2 Turning point: The point of the roast where the temperature of the coffee beans begins to match the temperature inside the roaster.

3 Mailliard reaction: Fancy term used to describe the process of things turning brown and caramelizing.

4 Rate of rise: The rate at which the temperature of the beans inside the drum rises. Think of it like accelerating a car; high rate of rise in speed at first, followed by a declining rate of rise as you slow down your increasing speed to the legal speed limit.

5 First crack: The point in a roast where enough pressure builds up inside the coffee leaving it no option but to crack and expand in size. It is very much akin to the experience of popcorn, but of course one cannot sprinkle salt on the roasted coffee and eat it while watching a movie.