The time has come for us here at Fat Puppy Coffee Roasters to open our online store. Much work remains; coffee blends to create, test shots of espresso to pull, great decaf to source, and the list goes on. At some point you have to “fish or cut bait”, and we are going to fish.
A few weeks ago I started to work on developing our roasting profiles for each of our coffees. A roast profile is basically a plot of the time and temperature during a roast. Some plots will look like a bell curve and others will look like an S curve. As a specialty coffee roaster, I start off by roasting a coffee, adjusting heat and airflow, monitoring time, and then in a frenzy, pull about eight samples from the roaster, all while noting the time and temperature of each sample. The eight samples will range from a cinnamon colored bean that can taste sour or bitter, to a dark brown colored bean that can taste bittersweet or burnt. I brew each sample, Jennifer and I taste, picking the one we like the best. Noting the sample’s time and temperature, I roast another batch of green coffee, altering the time and temperature, and pull more samples. We taste the new round of samples to see if we like the coffee that matched the first one. We will repeat this process over and over for each coffee until we are satisfied that each coffee’s personality shines through.
We currently have three coffees that we are excited to share with you. We love our Guatemalan Huehuetenango, Ethiopian Harar, and our Colombian Supremo. I am real close with the Papua New Guinea Fair Trade Organic, and the Brazilian Natural Yellow Bourbon. Then it will be on to decaf and the blends; a breakfast blend and a “French Roast” blend will be a good start. We can’t forget about espresso! We love Single Origin espresso but want to offer a consistent espresso blend as well.
As you can see, we still have some bait to cut, but who is up for a little fishing? I hope we catch a big one!
Featured image courtesy of Eoin Gardiner.