Green coffee smells like hay and peanuts and not much else. Everything you have ever loved about coffee — the chocolate, the florals, the caramel — does not exist yet when the beans go into the drum. It is manufactured, in twelve minutes, by heat and judgement.
The roaster's job is mostly listening. Around minute eight the beans crack, audibly, like distant popcorn — first crack, the border between grass and coffee. What happens in the ninety seconds after decides whether the cup will be bright or bittersweet.
The craft of stopping
Roasting is easy to do and hard to do twice. The skill is repeatability: the same bean, the same curve, the same crack, week after week, in a machine that behaves differently on a humid day.
Every coffee we sell carries a roast date, not because freshness is a slogan but because coffee is produce. It peaks between day five and day twenty-one, then quietly retires. Buy less, more often — the same advice as bread.
We roast on Tuesdays. If you have ever wondered what your kitchen is missing, it is the smell of minute eleven.
