Random thoughts: coffee roasting

Recently, some friends always ask me about coffee roasting skills, at what temperature to add beans, what temperature to put beans at, and some friends ask where I can learn coffee roasting and so on. With regard to coffee roasting, this seems to be a simple but complex, open and mysterious topic, simple and open, that is, as long as people who know and know about coffee all know a thing or two about coffee roasting, such as depth, burst, color, and so on, they are all familiar, but the complexity and mystery is because, in the end, how to master these standards, people can not say why.

In fact, contact with coffee roasting is not very long, can only be said to have some experience, on this road is also feeling the stones to cross the river. Many people are very melancholy, saying why there is no public occasion for coffee roasting to discuss coffee roasting, and some people say that I have used whose baking method and baking curve, but the baked things are very different from their own standards.

Some people say that roasting is out of touch with each other, others say that families are silent in order to preserve their roasting skills, and even Italians, who are well versed in coffee roasting, seldom talk about coffee roasting in public.

At this point, in fact, I don't know what I want to talk about in this random article. I don't know where to start or where to come to an end. A nearly two-hour phone call with an elder in the coffee industry yesterday gave me a deeper understanding of coffee roasting and confirmed some of my ideas.

When I first came into contact with baking, like many friends, I wanted to apply a "pattern" once and for all. I wanted to complete all the baking according to this straw. This straw may be a "recognized" curve, a "standard" burst point, a series of timetable, etc., but none of this seems to allow me to climb out of this unfathomable whirlpool. A pot of beans was poured out, wrinkled and ugly again and again, I complained about the beans, I blamed the equipment, and I even doubted my gas, until once, I abandoned all the "straws" and tried to bake according to my understanding of coffee baking and my own equipment. Instead, I got the joy that the straw didn't give me.

I gradually realized that, like coffee making, coffee roasting is full of a large number of independent variables. Coffee beans themselves, roasting equipment (type of equipment, heat preservation of equipment, sensitivity of equipment, way of temperature measurement, etc.), environment, baking quantity, etc., these independent variables make roasting itself mysterious, thus making a raw bean go through the baptism of "fire" and "wind". The process of eventually becoming "black gold" is full of unknowns, and it may be one-sided to judge a baking by a curve, by the time of two bursts, or by the duration and rhythm of baking. No matter whether it is the curve, bursting time or any standard, it seems to add a number of conditions, otherwise the curve may not be suitable for you at all.

I don't know whether people keep their unique skills tight-lipped or silent because they are tasteless. No matter what the reason, I still believe that existence is reasonable. If we don't talk about it, there must be a reason for not talking about it.

But no matter how much you don't talk about it, no matter how others don't say it, beans will always mature, and there will always be black golden beans. Maybe one day you will have a black golden bean of your own according to your own rules and your own unique understanding.