So I wanted to show you very quickly what happens to coffee as it's roasted.
This is green coffee
Coffee is the seed from the fruit of a flowering tree
and it's dried...it's processed and dried...out of the skin
and it becomes this very dense, green bean.
It's not really a bean, it's a seed...
but we'll call it a bean, because everyone does.
As you start to roast the coffee, it goes from that, to a slightly pale, white color.
What's on the outside here, is Chaff, it's also called silver-skin.
and it comes off during roasting and the next stage...
So it's turning pale at about 2 to 3 minutes into roasting.
Some roasters a little bit faster, in an air roaster,
now we have kind of a tan or orange stage,
where it's definitely losing some heat, losing some moisture content,
The coffee is becoming a little bit lighter, moves around a little quicker in the roaster...
And this is the tan stage, this is very slow, this early development,
From the green to the tan...you know, in some roasters that could be ten minutes of development
until you hit first crack, so
it's still quite a light colored coffee, not what you'd want to drink
It would taste very grain-y if you drank it.
Now here we're approaching first crack, which, like i said,
could happen anywhere from, in a real fast roaster, several minutes...
in a drum roaster, maybe as long as 10 or 12 minutes.
And you see this very highly varied surface texture, and this pale silver-skin, chaff in there...
Now here's where we've actually gotten into coffee that could be considered...you could drink this coffee.
This coffee has gone through first crack, so there's been this audible, popping sound
In the roaster, and that's kind of your clue. Once that finishes...the popping...
That coffee has gone through first crack, we call this City Roast.
It's a lighter roast, and looking under the strong light
you see all that dark surface texture in it, but this could be a very good roast
for coffee that you want to be a bright, lively cup.
This is a little bit more roast, but you notice that this bean has puffed up a little bit more
it's opened up that crease, it's not quite so flat on this side.
The silver-skin is a little darker. So that's a City Plus Roast.
We'd call this one a City plus, too.
Now these last stages since I started showing you the brown coffee,
these are pulled at 30 second increments or less, so
in the first part of the roast, from green to yellow, things happen really slow.
and then it's quite a fast process so you really have to be there watching the coffee.
This is an excellent roast right here, a great roast level to not get that charred taste,
but have a really sweet and refined cup. That's a City Plus Roast.
Now here's a Full City roast. We're right on the verge of getting into Second Crack here,
which tells you the coffee's getting into dark roast territory.
Notice it's more puffed up, and the chaff layer in here has changed color.
It's a dark color now.
Now if you like Starbucks, this is what you like.
This coffee has gone fully through the Second Crack,
And in fact, it's so explosive, this crack, that it's releasing carbon dioxide that's formed during roasting, within the bean,
It's actually blown off a piece of the bean right here.
And then finally, we're at a VERY dark roast, now,
This is very fresh coffee, I roasted this, actually less than an hour ago,
But you can already see some oils starting to develop on the surface there.
All of those last three roasts I've shown you, if you left them for 3 days
they'd have oils on them. And, in fact, you know, if you leave them for months, they'd be glazed in oil
and that's what old coffee looks like when it's Dark Roasted.
So that is, briefly, the changes in color during Coffee Roasting.