What Common Situations Occur During the Coffee Roasting Process?

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Common Issues in the Coffee Roasting Process

FrontStreet Coffee offers a brief overview of the common situations that occur during coffee roasting.

Coffee roasting is the process of applying heat to raw coffee beans to drive off excess moisture and transform certain components inside the bean into caramelized sugars and flavorful oils. Roasting is an essential stage in developing flavor: the flavor compounds must be roasted to fully express their distinctive character.

Underdeveloped Beans

Underdeveloped beans typically show distinct astringency and grassy flavors. They result from defective beans or from roasting too quickly at too low a temperature, which leaves the core of the bean insufficiently dehydrated and produces an underdeveloped roast.

Scorched Beans

Scorched beans always come from excessively high surface temperatures. Whether the cause is applying too much heat at the start of the roast or badly burning the bean surface, properly scorched beans give off an asphalt-like aroma when broken open. They usually show black spots on the surface and have a loose, crumbly structure.

Uneven Roasting

Many factors contribute to uneven roasting, such as inconsistent bean sizes, insufficient dehydration in the early stages, or uneven color development during the crack phase. Roaster drum design and overloading the drum can also cause uneven roasting.

Extreme Roasting

Many people chase particular coffee flavors, whether body, richness or bitterness, roasting either too light or too dark as they blindly search for their preference. At this point roasting should follow the bean's inherent characteristics, such as its hardness and particle size and other fixed qualities, rather than a blind pursuit of extreme profiles that throw the coffee's taste and its essential nature badly out of balance.

FrontStreet Coffee Recommendation

Roasting is where flavor is made, so it pays to choose beans whose roast level matches your taste. For those who want balance, the FrontStreet Queen's Estate Brazil is an ideal medium roast: grown in the world's largest coffee-producing country and made from the distinctive Yellow Bourbon variety, it is clean and sweet with aromas of cream peanut, chocolate, toasted bread and sugarcane, and it works for pour-over, moka pot or espresso machine alike.

If you prefer a sweeter cup, the FrontStreet Strawberry Candy Geisha Blend combines a honey-processed Costa Rican coffee with a washed Panamanian Geisha. A medium roast keeps the balance between them, giving orange-blossom honey notes and a rounded sweetness that shines as cold brew, pour-over or espresso.

And for a gentle, everyday medium roast, the FrontStreet 2013 Natural Typica delivers soft notes of nuts, brown sugar, black tea and dried apricot with real versatility across pour-over, cold brew and drip machines. Finally, the FrontStreet Jamaica Blue Mountain No.1 shows what a well-judged medium roast can do at its most elegant, blending chocolate, roasted nuts, cream and caramel into a famously even cup.