Figuring out how I want to roast a couple of the new coffees that arrived yesterday. I'm starting with a Yemen Mocha Hawari. From a purely physical perspective, this is the best Yemeni coffee I've had in my shop, also the most expensive.

Follow

Most of my experience with Yemeni coffee is very small seeds lacking uniformity in size with a high proportion harvested from unripe fruit. The coffee I'm tasting today is larger (though still on the small side for my shop), more uniform, and from ripe cherries.

· · Web · 1 · 0 · 0

As usual, I'm starting by evaluating the coffee across a range of roasts that I hope extends from too light to too dark. In this case, 10 different roast levels. The first two are thin and vegetal, lacking in the qualities that I want out of this coffee. The last two start to get smoky and leathery, which is also not quite what I want, but cups 3-8 are quite pleasant with honey and chocolate attributes.

Through that middle range, body gets heavier as the coffee gets darker. As the coffee cools, the lighter end doesn't hold up as well, still clearly a good coffee but lacking interesting attributes. Cups 6 and 8, however, hold up particularly well.

Cup 8 would be a dark roast if I decided to go with that. Medium-heavy body, low acidity, bittersweet chocolate flavor attributes. Cup 6 would be a medium roast. This one is exceptionally well balanced, preserving the honey attribute and the chocolate expressed as more of a milk chocolate. The main deficiency there is a slightly low overall intensity of flavor that I think I can fix with a profile tweak. I'm going to try that for my first production test batch.

Checking the roasting data, cup 6 ended about 13 seconds and 5F° past the start of second crack.

Sign in to participate in the conversation
Typica Social

The social network of the future: No ads, no corporate surveillance, ethical design, and decentralization! Own your data with Mastodon!