I had an awesome cup of coffee this morning! - PeachParts Mercedes-Benz Forum

dannym · #1 03-05-2009, 09:34 AM

Got my new IRoast2 in the mail yesterday.
Roasted up a batch last nignt and had awesome coffee this morning.

The next step is to get or grow coffee plants. You can't get any fresher than that! Picking berries off the plant, drying them & roasting them within a day or 2.

The IRoast has programmable roasting profiles so I can create up to 10 profiles and save them.
Pretty cool

Danny

rs899 · #2 03-05-2009, 09:47 AM

Geez, that's overkill, but I am all for roasting greenies. I would love to have some coffee plants, but I don't think they grow here, do they? Do you know of any that really work in FL?

Rick

dannym · #3 03-05-2009, 10:59 AM

Yeah it's overkill but I want to experiment with different roasting profiles & blending so it's the best one for that.
Actually a drum roaster would be overkill. Don't see any of them for less that $500.

Yeah coffee will grow in FL. I think they are ok down to 50 or 60 degrees. On the real coldest days they can be covered or brought inside.
There are some plants that only grow to 4' and can be kept indoors all year long.

Danny

Zeus · #4 03-05-2009, 11:02 AM

That's cool! I fresh grind beans for every espresso/latte I make, but I've drawn the line at roasting. Would be cool to try at some point though. Fresh grinding made a difference, I can imagine that fresh roasting will do so even further.

Such an interesting and powerful little bean.

865sp300e · #5 03-05-2009, 11:09 AM

L.E. Faubert & Co. has become not only a coffee broker and a private taster, but also, most important, a NYBOT-certified "cupper," or grader. His ability to occupy all three roles puts him at the choke point of the entire $19 billion industry, a slim bridge between the hundreds of importers, exporters, manufacturers, growers, and shippers, and the tens of millions of U.S. coffee drinkers.

As with other commodities, the process of "discovering" the daily price for coffee is built on hand signs and even lip-reading; each contract accounts for 37,500 pounds of the estimated 16 billion pounds of coffee grown annually worldwide. Faubert and the other 47 NYBOT-licensed cuppers determine which coffee gets sold at the open-market price and which at a punitive discount because of inferior quality. So when the traders in the pit that morning were buying arabica futures for March 2007, they were betting not only on the size of the October 2006 harvest in, say, Antigua, Guatemala, but on what Faubert and his fellow cuppers would think of it.

A cupper grades coffee the way a wine-taster grades wine, in an exercise in carefully calculated subjectivity. The semantics are as finely parsed as they are difficult to define, with some 240 commercial classifications of coffee. NYBOT cuppers look--and smell and taste--for "defects" ranging from "fermented" to "earthy" to "potato" (yes, certain beans from Burundi, Rwanda, and Uganda can actually taste like a raw Idaho baker). There is no perfect coffee, Faubert says. He is after a coffee that is simply "sound" enough to be traded on the futures market, meaning it will have no "substantial" bad characteristics. In those 2006 Guatemalan arabicas, for example, Faubert might detect, mixed in among those that are "clean," "acidic," and "bright" (all good characteristics associated with Guatemalan, Colombian, and Mexican arabicas), a cup or two that taste "dirty," "flat," or "musty."

But even Faubert has a hard time des-cribing what he tastes. "It's like if I ask you to describe 'sour,' " he says. "You know what sour is, but can you give me a synonym? Probably not." Still, he continues, with all due modesty, "I can tell from blindly tasting a cup of coffee not just that it is from Guatemala, but from what state it comes, at what altitude it was grown, and on what mountain." He then tells of walking with a fellow grader into the cupping room at the NYBOT, where five tables were set with 60 cups of coffee each. "There's a fermented cup over there," Faubert's friend declared, then walked to one of the tables, tasted a few samples, and pushed the offending cup forward. "He was right," Faubert recalls. "Three hundred cups of coffee in the room, and he smelled the fermented cup the second he walked in."

Not surprisingly, not too many palates are that finely calibrated. Every two to four years, the NYBOT attempts to anoint new coffee cuppers through a two-to-three-hour exam (a pair of cuppers serve as judges). Candidates are required to grade 10 samples by counting the imperfections; then they describe the myriad characteristics in 60 more cups of coffee. If 40 people take the test, one or two might pass. Often, no one does.

LUVMBDiesels · #6 03-05-2009, 11:11 AM

Looks like a great machine!

You can buy coffee plants at logees.com. I grew them indoors and put them outside in the summer. In FL they can grow in the shade very well... Just give them a good rich soil and lots of fertilizer. It takes about 4 years to get a good yield from a plant. I had four of them and had enough beans to last me a year.

http://www.logees.com/prodinfo.asp?number=R1180-4

dannym · #7 03-05-2009, 11:22 AM

I saw that before. I got turned away from it because it said to hand polinate them. Is that true?
If it's not I'l definitely get a couple of them.

Danny

awsrock · #8 03-05-2009, 11:56 AM

There's a place where I live that roasts their own coffee, they even have a tree (more for fun, it isn't too happy here in IL)

Their coffee is unbelievable..the freshness really makes a difference. I probably go through a pound every two weeks or so, and keep it in the freezer. Doesn't seem to degrade much at all in quality.

pawoSD · #9 03-05-2009, 12:32 PM

Here in MI that probably wouldn't work. Lucky Floridians.......

In the winter here the sun pretty much goes away for 6 months....

I like the name of that machine though.

dannym · #10 03-05-2009, 01:13 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by awsrock

There's a place where I live that roasts their own coffee, they even have a tree (more for fun, it isn't too happy here in IL)

Their coffee is unbelievable..the freshness really makes a difference. I probably go through a pound every two weeks or so, and keep it in the freezer. Doesn't seem to degrade much at all in quality.

Over in Ybor City near Tampa they still roast their own coffee. And handroll cigars too!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ybor_City,_Tampa,_Florida

Danny

rs899 · #11 03-05-2009, 01:15 PM

I'll have to research it. Is it a robusta or arabica? Somehow I think all the flavor enhancements I make by roasting and grinding carefully will be trashed by a substandard bean. I mean, if Kona is in demand, why nor Florida.? Probably soil and climate have a big influence on flavor, that's why there are so many choices in beans.

dannym · #12 03-05-2009, 01:46 PM

What's the difference between this:
http://www.logees.com/prodinfo.asp?number=R1180-4

And this:
http://gurneys.com/product.asp_Q_pn_E_11295
On this site is says:

POLLINATE BY HAND TO ENSURE FRUIT SET.

Is this really necessary???

Danny

BodhiBenz1987 · #13 03-05-2009, 03:17 PM

That's sweet. I'll stick to my lazy Starbucks pick-up for now, but roast-it-yourself sounds pretty cool. I'll bet my dad would love that ... where do you buy it?

beevly · #14 03-05-2009, 03:58 PM

I've been using that same roaster for about a year and a half and it still works great. Use less beans than they say though or you'll overload it and get burned/uneven roasts. 120 gm is about max. That amount has me roasting 3-4 times a week. After a while you really develop an eye and nose for the perfect roast.

I have a strong vent hood on my stove so I can roast inside. If you can't do that you'll have to figure something else out because the smoke will set off your alarms and stink up the place. Roasting outside or in the unheated detached garage is not a good option in CT.

I buy my beans from http://www.sweetmarias.com/.

sfloriII · #15 03-05-2009, 04:04 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by awsrock

There's a place where I live that roasts their own coffee, they even have a tree (more for fun, it isn't too happy here in IL)

Their coffee is unbelievable..the freshness really makes a difference. I probably go through a pound every two weeks or so, and keep it in the freezer. Doesn't seem to degrade much at all in quality.

I buy my beans at Costco where they roast them fresh. I then vacuum pack them until just before each cup when I grind enough beans for one cup of coffee, then vacuum pack them again. They never go stale and I keep them in the pantry. Pretty good setup.