Trip to James Gourmet Roastery

While we at Taylor St. Baristas are generally quite good (it's always nice to be reasonably modest...) making delicious coffee from behind our espresso machines, it could be said that our knowledge of how the beautiful roasted coffee gets into those delightful purple bags for us to brew could do with some brushing up.  A quick survey of staff came back with results that varied from "the coffee roasts on the trees" to "the roasting fairy waves her magic wand...".


Ok, that might be a slight exaggeration, but although we have some serious roasting geeks amongst our staff, it can never hurt to increase on our knowledge of the whole process.  With that in mind we took up James' (of James' Gourmet coffee) up on his offer of a visit to his roastery in Ross-on-wye. 
After a bus journey consisting of twenty-seven Taylor St. staff oohing and aahing at sheep and hills (quite a novelty coming from London...) we were greeted by James and his staff and soon after we were getting a demonstration of the roasting process:

Put very simply, roasting coffee involves a drum with a large gas burner which heats the green beans up to around 400 degrees fahrenheit.  This produces magical chemical reactions, turning an inedible, useless bean into the product that will, if all goes right, eventually end up in a delicious espresso or sublime flat white.  It's where the magic of coffee really begins...

Some sacks of green beans.  James has lots of great coffees from Central America, in particular Honduras and El Salvador, at the moment:

One of the chief skills of a good roaster is the ability to create a 'roasting profile' for a particular coffee that is right for the type of bean and the brewing method it will be used for.  A roasting profile includes the temperature the beans are roasted at, the length of time, and the cooling process, amongst other variables.  In general, filter roasts are quite light, and espresso roasts a bit darker (but not too dark!)

We were given the opportunity to cup a coffee roasted at a series of different temperatures, to see how temperature affects the flavours of the brew.  This turned out to be one of the most enlightening lessons of the day; we could immediately taste the dramatic difference just a few degrees of roasting makes:

 

Some green beans, and the finished product:

 

Ross, your friendly head barista at Taylor St: Old Broad Street, picked and roasted some green beans WITH HIS OWN BARE HANDS.  If you're keen to try the coffee, we're going to have it as our filter this very week in the shop. If you have any questions about the coffee give us a shout and we'd love to chat about it!

 

 



And finally, I give you Jochem: Serious About Spoons: