What situations often occur during the roasting process? What kind of coffee flavors result from improper roasting?

FrontStreet Coffee's Overview of Common Situations in the Coffee Roasting Process

Coffee roasting is the process of subjecting green coffee beans to specific temperatures to drive off excess moisture, allowing certain compounds inside the bean to transform into caramelized sugars and flavor oils. Roasting is an essential stage in the development of coffee flavor; the flavor compounds in coffee must pass through roasting before they fully express their unique character.

Underbaked Coffee

Underbaked coffee typically carries distinct astringency and grassy flavors. It comes from defective beans or from roasting too quickly at low temperatures, which leaves the core of the bean insufficiently dehydrated and therefore underbaked.

Burnt Coffee

Burnt coffee is invariably caused by excessively high surface temperatures. Whether the cause is beginning the roast with too much heat and scorching the beans, badly burnt beans give off a tar-like aroma when broken open. The surface of the bean shows mostly black spots, and the coffee's structure becomes loose and brittle.

Uneven Roasting

Many factors contribute to uneven roasting. Inconsistent bean sizes, for instance, or insufficient dehydration and development in the early stages can produce inconsistent color once the beans enter the crack development stage. The design of the roaster blades and overloading the drum during roasting can also cause unevenness.

Extreme Roasting

Many people chase flavor, body, or bitterness to an extreme, roasting coffee very light or very dark while blindly following personal preference. At that point, roasting ought to be based on the individual characteristics of the beans, such as their hardness and particle size and other fixed traits, rather than blindly taking extreme routes and creating a significant mismatch between how the coffee tastes and what it essentially is.

FrontStreet Coffee Recommendation

During roasting, three elements that decide final flavor have to be managed carefully: acidity, sweetness, and bitterness. The darker the roast, the more bitter and heavier the coffee; the lighter the roast, the more acidic and lighter it becomes. So for anyone chasing a balanced cup, it makes sense to begin with medium-roasted beans. If you dislike both sourness and bitterness, FrontStreet's Queen Estate is a solid starting point. Grown in Brazil, the world's largest coffee producer, it is a distinctive local yellow Bourbon with a clean, mellow sweetness. Medium-roasted, it shows the aroma and sweetness of creamy peanut, chocolate, toasted bread, and sugarcane, and it works as pour-over as well as in a moka pot or espresso machine.

For a sweeter medium roast, FrontStreet's Strawberry Candy is the first choice, thanks to its fruit-forward character. It is unusual because it combines two well-known origins in Central and South America: a honey-processed coffee from Costa Rica and a washed Geisha from Panama. To bring out the best of both, FrontStreet roasts it to a medium level, so the cup shows the orange-blossom honey character alongside a rounded sweetness. It suits cold brew, pour-over, and espresso, and it is refreshing from the first sip. As a representative Chinese specialty coffee, FrontStreet's 2013 sun-dried Typica carries the authentic flavor of Yunnan small-variety coffee. To restore its balanced, gentle character, we roast it medium, giving it soft notes of nuts, brown sugar, black tea, and dried apricot all at once. It works in pour-over, cold brew, and drip machines, at excellent value.

Jamaica Blue Mountain is planted with the Typica variety, a world-renowned fine Arabica, and its exceptional geography is essential to the balanced flavor of Blue Mountain coffee. FrontStreet's Blue Mountain No.1, sometimes called the emperor of coffees, is roasted to a medium level, because that is what fuses its acidity, bitterness, sweetness, and body into a powerfully elegant aroma. From the first sip you taste the roasted notes of chocolate, toasted nuts, cream, and caramel, a combination matched by no other coffee.