As well as getting optimal freshness, the beauty of roasting at home allows you to delve into different origins, customise the roast to suit your brew methods, and ultimately, roast to your taste.
In this post, we introduce our newest selection of green coffees and the recommended roast recipes that accompany them. We also explain some of the considerations behind this, and explore why you might use different roast recipes for your different brew method.
Selecting coffees to be part of the At Home range is one of our favourite parts of the job. We’re aiming to curate a selection that allows you to access a whole range of flavours that different coffees offer, while also showcasing some of the best coffees in the world. But that’s only half of it. The other part, of course, is how to roast and then brew the coffee.
Our aim is to unlock the full potential of the coffee and, hopefully, discover a new roast for you to fall in love with.
The coffees we’ve created these new roast recipes for are AA Maganjo, Kenya & Sitio Esperança, Brazil & Hafursa Waro, Ethiopia and we can’t wait for you to try them.
The way the hot water interacts with the ground coffee for filter and espresso brewing is very different, so when brewing in different ways, we may want different right roast degree, solubility and roast development to bring out the flavours we’re looking for.
Let’s start with espresso. These shots are small, highly concentrated extractions. When brewing espresso, a short, quick burst of hot water flows through the coffee. Typically extraction time is only 25 – 35 seconds.
Usually a longer and darker roast will increase solubility and reduce acidity. This is ideal for a small, punchy, and flavour packed espresso shot. So espresso roasts typically have a longer development time after the first crack; bringing espresso into the glorious world of dark, longer roasts ( find out more about exploring dark, medium, light roasts here ).
On the other hand, with filter brewing, the water temperature is normally slightly lower and the coffee has had much more contact time. This means that the water can slowly extract all the flavours. The coffee here doesn’t need to be as soluble and may be a bit less developed. So whilst roasting for filter, the maximum temperature is usually slightly lower and there is a shorter development time, allowing the brighter flavours to come through.
If you compare the filter and espresso recipes side by side, you’ll this. These relatively small differences in time and temperature have a significant impact on flavour, which is why the precision of IKAWA At Home is so valuable.
To illustrate, let’s take a look at the IKAWA roast recipes for our green coffee Hafursa Waro from Yigacheffe, Ethiopia.
We’ve been having a blast in the office developing and tasting these roast recipes. Of course, there are no hard and fast rules; why not try brewing the filter roast as an espresso and see how it tastes? Or roast the Colombian coffee with our Ethiopian recipes – do you get a similar time for the first crack?
We found that the filter roast certainly has a punchier acidity when brewed as espresso, and we had to make the grind a little finer to get a better extraction. Then, when we tried the espresso roasts as filter, we noticed they tended to accentuate the darker chocolate notes much more.
We hope you enjoy playing with the new coffees and roast recipes, and would love to hear how you get on – we’ve started a thread on the Hot Air Community…
