Coffee Merchants of Green Toronto
Kenyan Coffee Part 2

Glen: So while the resting isn’t difficult it is something that you’ve got a kind of tune your ear and your eye tune.

Derek: To me its like toast you really—yes you just have to pay attention to your toaster. If you see smoke coming out of your toaster you pretty much assured you burn your toast and so what we’re doing is saying yes all you really doing is paying attention to heat and that heat is at 400 degrees at first crack begins and then you’re taking it somewhere between 430 and 470 degrees and that’s all the risk to roasting.

So it’s something that can be learned really quite quickly and there’s really nothing to fear from it. There is a second crack.

Glen: Yes, there it is

Derek: Yeah. Yes so I’ll let just let it go because that’s just the beginning of second crack and it’s just telling us its happening. What way do we hear a couple of more of them there they are and then now we could actually just go and switch it to the cooling stage?

So there’s definite second crack beginning, so there you have medium roast. Now, in this case you’ll see again like in the last case that the African coffees often will tend to have some very small beans and those small beans will simply give up a little bit of that oil.

Glen: Okay.

Derek: So when we look at it you can see that there’s a little bit of a shine but, that isn’t a shine from all of the beans, it’s a shine from just a couple of these beans. Again part of it is a little bit that you learned just for doing it.

I’d say if there’s any way to sort of simple file roasting, you have to got through three things. One burning it, one under roasting it and once just doing it to medium and if you’ve done that then you’ve really but cover the range of roasting, there’s not too much more you can do. So then it’s about learning the coffee and

Glen: And on the two extremes you can do immediately.

Derek: You’ll know immediately. One will be under roasted coffee is definitely sour the sugars have been caramelized and you’ll recognized it immediately. Pass it will make quite a bit a noise in your action of coffee grinder.

Over roasting will taste like burn peanuts and so you’ve charred the roast and that char is a Caribbean flavor of the coffee, that’s enough cooling time and go medium roast and you could see we still have a nice for the white script burning down the middle of beans and we’re still on the light side.

But this again would be one of those great African coffees this was definitely given a great deal of sort to help by this system of supply with Britain because it was one of the colonial countries and what they tend to do is they tend to build up a very, very, very good supply infrastructure to get this and keep the individual character to the bean and what I mean by that is that they’ve running their own auction for years and so you’re hearing more and more about coffee auctions in the market place.

Well here is a place where the coffee auction did exist right down to the individual micro farms and this are much adored and were mostly available in Europe. It took a long time for us to see good Kenyan Coffees in North America.

Glen: Because the Europeans were –

Derek: The Europeans are buying a lot and they have the relationship and they have the connections and what they were identifying is that it’s a very, very light floral coffee and the lighter roast and then when you’re switching over to the darker roast you quickly reveal the body and take it too dark and you loose quite quickly.

Glen: So it’s just want to showing.

Derek: That’s good.