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.
Read more about this topic: High Altitude Coffee Roasting
Famous quotes containing the word process:
“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)
“The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation.”
—Elias Canetti (b. 1905)
“The a priori method is distinguished for its comfortable conclusions. It is the nature of the process to adopt whatever belief we are inclined to, and there are certain flatteries to the vanity of man which we all believe by nature, until we are awakened from our pleasing dream by rough facts.”
—Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914)