Bear_B Senior Member Joined: 14 May 2008 Posts: 46 Location: Columbus, OH Expertise: I love coffee
Espresso: Francis Francis! X1 Grinder: Breville Vac Pot: Cona (I wish!!) Drip: no, French press Roaster: iRoast 2
Posted Thu May 15, 2008, 1:14pm Subject: Columbus, OH introduction to microroasting workshop
Hi all,
My wife started the local Slow Food convivium here in Columbus, and as part of their taste education series I'm putting on a home roasting demonstration and tasting on Sunday the 25th. The full details as well as a signup link are on the Slow Food Columbus Events page; I'll summarize the former below. I'd appreciate it if you'd pass along the info to anyone you think would be interested in attending.
Thanks! Bear
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Slow Food Columbus presents...
Coffee Microroasting Workshop Sunday, May 25, 10am $4 members / $6 nonmembers
If you're a coffee lover, you've probably narrowed down a favorite type of coffee -- maybe a favorite region, or country, or even a favorite bean. And you might be wondering where to go from there. Or you might be chafing at the expense of whole-bean roasted coffee. Or perhaps you like a lighter (or darker) roast than most people drink, or you'd be interested in exploring the nuances in the flavors of some of your favorite beans as they go from a lighter to a darker roast. Or maybe you simply like the idea of always having really, really fresh coffee in the morning. Even if you have no desire to roast your own coffee, you might just be curious about the process of how beans are roasted.
If you fall into any of these categories, you may be interested in our coffee micro-roasting workshop. We will explore roasting coffee in 1/3-pound batches in a small, programmable fluid-bed roaster designed for home use. We will observe the roasting process and discuss the pros and cons of roasting your own beans, and we will sample three different roasts to compare their characteristics.
The workshop will be held at the home of Colleen, leader of Slow Food Columbus, and led by her husband Bear, a coffee lover of long standing who roasts the beans that they make into coffee every morning. Because of the intimate venue attendance will be limited to no more than ten people; a reservation will be required in advance and a nominal fee ($4 per person for members, $6 for nonmembers) will be collected at the door.
The first, and most unusual, of the three beans that we will explore will be the Guatemala Huehuetenango Finca San Vicente SHB. Huehuetenango (way-way-ten-AN-go) is the only coffee in the world at present that has been singled out for preservation by Slow Food’s Ark of Taste program, which seeks to maintain biodiversity in the face of globalization, environmental damage, and the homogenization of taste. Finca San Vicente is situated at an altitude of 1300 to 1600 meters in the Cuchumatanes mountain range of Huehuetenango. It is unusually humid, and its terrain is steep, with soil that has a high clay content. While San Vicente has a few different cultivars, this lot of beans comes exclusively from their Bourbon varietal, from some of the higher trees in the farm. Because those trees mature more slowly, the beans tend to be more dense, and therefore more flavorful.
The second bean will be a classic coffee-lover’s coffee: an Ethiopia Yirgacheffe from the town of Idido, the Ethiopia Organic Idido Misty Valley. This Yirgacheffe is produced by the Bagersh family, who have traded coffee in Ethiopia for generations. Abdullah Bagersh has adopted his grandparents’ technique of dry-processing coffee by sun-drying it in its fruit, and then separating the dried fruit from the green coffee bean, rather than separating the undried fruit from the bean by agitating them in water—a technique adopted throughout the region in the 1960s. For that reason, dry-processing is unusual for a Yirgacheffe, though it is still the dominant method of producing Harars.
The final bean will be a favorite, but an unusually difficult one to pin down: a Sumatra Classic Mandheling. The big problem with Sumatras is that they don’t follow the rules that most other coffees follow. You typically can’t track a lot back to a single producer or estate, because most Sumatras are cultivated by small producers and brought to cooperatives where they are aggregated and sold. Because soil and climate vary throughout Sumatra, and quality control standards vary as well, consistency is difficult to ensure over time. Why bother with such a quarrelsome and mercurial bean? Because, to Bear anyway, a superb Sumatra is the essence of what good coffee should be. He tried four different Sumatras and finally settled on this one, a very nice Lake Toba Mandheling from Sumatra Typica trees that has good earthiness and peppery overtones, without even a hint of acidity.
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(Edit: I returned to find the link to the Slow Food webpage removed, and a note saying that it was deleted bc. it's a commercial link. I replaced the words "Slow Food" but didn't re-add the link. To be clear, though: Slow Food is a registered 501c3 nonprofit organization, all volunteer. No one involved with the Columbus convivium draws a penny in salary. The goal of the organization is to build a community, not to make money. The costs mentioned below simply cover the cost of the event. I only posted this message because it never occurred to me that it might run afoul of website guidelines regarding commercial postings. If I posted it in error, please accept my apologies and feel free, moderators, to delete it.)
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