Common Coffee Roasting Mistakes: No one can achieve the perfect roasting level the first or the next few times. It requires professional knowledge and is accompanied by a few batches of faulty coffee with a lot of experience. But it’s easier when you understand the coffee roasting errors you’re seeing. Let’s look at Common Coffee Roasting Mistakes with Helena to know them. Let’s go into the details!
Common Coffee Roasting Errors
Baked Coffee
This error occurs when the coffee is heated for too long but has not reached the first crack stage. You can also understand it as if the coffee was “bottled.” This error is a bit difficult to detect with the naked eye. Only when you taste it can be recognized.
The “Backed Coffee” error makes the coffee extract less flavorful, sweet, and often described as bread or paper-like.
Underdevelopment Coffee
Underdeveloped coffee has a “grassy” flavor that lacks caramelized sugar that appears during roasting. Sometimes, but not always, this happens when the roaster uses a light roasting mode. But still, they need to adjust their roasting temperature a little more.
Burnt Coffee (Overdevelopment)
The opposite of underdeveloped coffee is overdeveloped. It is the point between dark roast coffee and over-developed coffee.
The bolder roasting is still a mistake, and it is a mistake that many customers with knowledge of coffee do not accept. The beans will be dark and oily, sometimes even black. The coffee extracted has a burning and bitter taste, smoke, and the smell of charcoal.
Quakers
Quakers are uncooked coffees that are difficult to recognize when examined with the naked eye. The reason is that poor soil conditions limit the development of sugar and starch. Technically, this is not a roasting error, but usually, you will only spot it after roasting.
The color of Quakers will be lighter than the rest of the coffee lot. The coffee cup’s flavor will dry up if removed, smelling like paper and cereal.
Coffee That Has Burnt (Scorching)
The burning event happens when the “loading temperature” is the same as the beginning temperature. It is easy to realize dark burning patches will appear on parts of the coffee bean surface. This phenomenon is burning. These coffee beans will taste of fat smoke.
Tipping
This may look similar to a burn, but the main difference is that the burn marks are located on the edges of the pea. This usually happens during the second crack. Although some people also say that too high an initial intake temperature can cause this error.
How to detect and prevent errors when roasting coffee
Roasters can use specialized equipment, such as coffee roasting analyzers. These will not prevent errors in coffee. But they will help you measure consistency during roasting. However, these tools are a bit expensive.
You can use a quality control panel to record the various physical changes that coffee has to go through. This will help you understand what is happening with coffee beans, and from there, there is a way to adjust your roasting process to prevent errors from occurring.
Recording this information can help you figure out the best roasting for each type of coffee. It is never possible to judge the roasting by just its color. The two types of coffee may look the same on the outside. On the other hand, consumers will never obtain a nice cup of coffee unless the roasting procedure is done correctly.
Roasting is an art as well as a science. The farmer may have planted and processed those beans with passion and devotion. But without a good roasting process, consumers will never get a good cup of coffee.
Choosing to roast requires technical know-how and is often the intuition that comes with experience. But recognizing common mistakes is an essential first step. So keep researching, roasting, and learning until you have complete control over all the variables during roasting.