Roasting coffee is often foreign to most. They know they like it, but have no idea on how it’s roasted. The coffee roasting process consists essentially of cleaning, roasting, cooling, grinding, and packaging operations. In larger operations, bags of green coffee beans are hand or machine-opened, dumped into a hopper, and screened to remove debris. The green beans are then weighed and transferred by belt or pneumatic conveyor to storage hoppers. From the storage hoppers, the green beans are conveyed to the roaster.
Smaller artesian roasters do not have conveyors. They load their roasters by hand. We’ve visited many roasters in Michigan, Ohio, Illinois and parts of Pennsylvania. One particular roaster that stood out to us was in Jackson, Michigan, the Jackson Coffee Co.
The roasters at Jackson Coffee Co. were very knowledgeable about coffee and had a roasting system that we were unfamiliar with. They had an Ambex YM-10 with a computerized system. The computerized system, known as the Roast Profile System, controlled every aspect of the roasting process. The roaster was able to set a specific time that he wanted the coffee to crack. He was also able to tell the roaster at what specific second he wanted the roast. Most of the roasts we watched were longer roasts and the coffee hit first crack at 13 minutes. The overall roast was often 17 minutes. Most roasters we viewed, which were 22 roasteries, had an overall time of 10 to 13 minutes.
We asked the roastmaster why such a long roast and he told us that the long roast at gradual increased temperatures produced an extremely smooth coffee. Jackson Coffee Co. claims that the slower roasting produces coffees that are smooth and without bitterness. We were skeptical at first because we had not seen this at the other roasters. When we sampled their coffees, our eyes were opened to what was truly smooth coffee. While we only sampled four of their blends, each had a unique smoothness to them. Unlike what we had experienced up to this point. The owner also suggested the picking the right coffees to roast was equally as important to a slow roasting process.