Monday, June 21, 2004


welcome and roasting the rwanda

first, thanks to all of you who've been redirected over here from the old bccy on earthlink. i will in 2 or 3 days get everything moved over here.

getting some of the old interpage links updated may take another day or two beyond that, so once again i beg your indulgence. but search and the archives should be restored shortly.

in the meantime, steady readers may recall i lent out my home coffee roasting device to a fellow java lover & old school chum. i posted the results of this on our beloved alt.coffee:

"i think i've accidentally created a monster: a fellow alum of st. john's asked to borrow my zach & dani.

his wife apparently works at an international development gig and so received as a gift a whole sack of what seems to be green rwandan seven lakes estate.

he didn't know what do to on the roaster front, so i lent him the z&d and he's gone to town.

he's roasting beyond 2nd crack, which seems dark to me for this arabica. but i don't know this coffee. he says it was a 25 min. roast to the fill line, but he wants to take it longer.

i worry he's baking the coffee and losing whatever delicate nuances are there. what do you think o z&d experts or rwanda lovers? please advise."

and i received a very interesting answer from fabulous altie, valued scaa consumer member & espresso expert jim schulman of chicago, which i'm reprinting in full here:

"The Z&D works more like a nano-drum-roaster than an air-roaster -- basically the lighter the load, the faster the roast. The 100 gram 'dark roast' line takes about 15 minutes to medium and works for espresso. If you want to do press pot, and preserve the origin flavor, 75 grams will get you down to 10-12 minutes. The regular fill line is for 'mellow' coffee lovers.

I posted a review of the Rwanda 7 lakes roasted medium/light, where it has a neat flower, spice, fresh cut grass, slightly chlorinated odor -- reminded me of a backyard with a pool or bleached sheets on a line. Darker it's sweet caramel and cedar. Enough sweetness and body to be good for SO [single-origin] espresso. Very much East African, but interestingly different from the others. A coffee well worth trying."

grass and chlorine don't seem like pluses to me! i'm wondering if jim is detecting the presence of taints or defects in the green coffee here. . .these usually come from poor growing or processing techniques.

they almost always harm the coffee's flavor, lowering the quality of the beverage. as scaa chief ted lingle once told me: "you don't have to be expert in all the taints and defects. just make sure you aren't drinking any!"

very few to zero defects is one of the hallmarks of high-quality, delicious specialty coffee. jim's description above makes me think the rwandan might not be quite up to snuff in that regard. . .

posted by fortune | 8:16 AM | top | link to this | email this: | | | 0 comments