Magic of roasting
We have already had occasion to say that the cup of coffee is part of the food traditions of many countries and has experienced tasters everywhere. Many people today seem to know everything about coffee talk of its origins, of different cultivars and their secret fragrances. The subject is certainly interesting and will not take time before to deal with. In this message, we want to make an initial contribution to a fundamental process in determining the organoleptic quality of coffee. Indeed only with the correct roasting, coffee can best develop his talents. The sensitivity and the experience of the master roasters are able to celebrate all those characteristics that would otherwise be dissipated and wasted. In Brambati Group this process has been studied for decades and the company library is full of futuristic studies as well contemporary complete with charts and works testing and implement sophisticated processes. All this experience and this technology at the service of taste have ancient roots in Brambati Group. And looking around the considerable literature that the company has accumulated over decades, you can also find old manuals, that perhaps today may seem a little ‘outdated, but which contain fundamentals and basic knowledge still valid and especially expressed with passion and clarity. To us who are amateurs rather than experts is very much like the “historic” manual Hoepli “Coffee and derivatives” written by Leonida Valerio in 1927. And turning those yellowing pages, which demonstrate how long the group accumulate knowledge, we discover that the roasting and visible phenomena during the heating coffee can be described almost as a literary text: “(…) Below 100 degrees nothing abnormal it makes visible, but at a temperature immediately higher green coffee smelling is very strong and water vapor development does not take time to be clearly visible. The bean begins to yellowing so sensitive and loses its elasticity, which makes a feeble sound under percussion and by crushing under the teeth (hot) it maintains the shape received. After the 140-150 degrees color slowly turns to the hazel, the mass emits a distinctive odor, slightly stinging (…) while the sound becomes more dull. These facts are growing in intensity since to 200 degrees. Then into mass a remarkable lightness begins to appear and with light brown color is observed a white smoke smelling like cocoa (…). Over 200 till about 230 degrees the development of bluish smoke becomes thick and impetuous presenting all the variations of the specific smell of roasted coffee. At the same time you develop a cheerful popping throughout the mass, due to violent rifts within the grains (…) The color of the grains goes meanwhile light brown from brown to dark if does not happen a quickly intervention of cooling. Around 230 degrees, fat substance, broken the cells that held it, invades the mass of grain by transferring itself on the surface, so the brown color, which is at first opaque, turns more or less quickly to brilliant. ” Today this knowledge are behind us and empiric realization, that is charming but little precise, was replaced by infallible process controls. The techniques that exposed to wide margins of error and where even the most accurate operators were unable to get constant quality, have been replaced by modern methods, repeatable with millimetric precision and customized according specific exigencies of each individual roasters (so-called ” roasting profiles”) to obtain a specific quality and a precise and constant feature of the brand.