Process
The coffee roasting process follows coffee processing and precedes coffee brewing. It consists essentially of sorting, roasting, cooling, and packaging but can also include grinding in larger scale roasting houses. 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. Roasters typically operate at temperatures between 240–275 °C (464–527 °F), and the beans are roasted for a period of time ranging from 3 to 30 minutes. Initially, the process is endothermic (absorbing heat), but at around 175 °C (347 °F) it becomes exothermic (giving off heat). For the roaster, this means that the beans are heating themselves and an adjustment of the roaster's heat source might be required. At the end of the roasting cycle, the roasted beans are dumped from the roasting chamber and cooled with forced air. Sometimes, in large commercial roasters, the beans are first quenched with a fine water mist. Torrefacto is a roasting process used in Spain and parts of Latin America involving the addition of sugar.
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Famous quotes containing the word process:
“A man had better starve at once than lose his innocence in the process of getting his bread.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The process of education in the oldest profession in the world is like any other educational process, in that it requires time and effort and patience; it can only be acquired by taking one step at a time, though the steps become accelerated after the first few.”
—Madeleine [Blair], U.S. prostitute and “madam.” Madeleine, ch. 4 (1919)
“There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one’s own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind.... Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn’t, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn’t have to; but if he didn’t want to he was sane and had to.”
—Joseph Heller (b. 1923)