In my Steemit introduction post I mentioned that I roasted coffee and would cover this as part of my posts. This is a small introduction to some of my coffee world, I purchase a variety of different green coffee beans from all around the world - here is a 60kg sack of Ethiopian Yirgacheffe
Coffee grows on trees - the coffee beans I roast actually form inside a cherry - with two coffee beans inside each cherry.
The cherries are picked off the trees, and then processed to remove the coffee beans from the cherries. This can either be sun drying so the cherry dries out and can be broken up to remove the beans - or a washing process where the cherries are run through a water system to break them apart and extract the coffee beans.
As you can see above the green coffee beans, once free from the cherry are sorted. When they are sorted beans are collected together that are a similar size - and any beans with defects (broken, damaged or various issues while they were growing) are discarded.
The green coffee beans I receive in a 60kg sack look like they above picture - all that careful picking and sorting produces a perfect product ready to be roasted.
And this is where I roast the green coffee, the bigger machine on the right is a 5kg Gas Heated coffee roaster - as the name suggests it will roast 5kg of green coffee beans in one go. The two smaller machines are 1kg electric coffee roasters. Roasting coffee can take between 12 and 17 minutes depending on the type of coffee and how dark you wish to roast it. When the coffee reaches the darkness in colour I want it - then I release it into a large cooling tray at the front that sucks cold air over the beans and stirs the beans to make sure they do not burn while cooling.
And that completes this post, coffee from plant to roasted coffee bean. Of course now we need to grind the roasted coffee beans up and brew them in something - but that will a different post to look forward to.
You can see the green coffee bean varieties I sell here https://www.pennineteaandcoffee.com/collections/green-coffee
The Speciality coffee beans I roast and sell are listed here https://www.pennineteaandcoffee.com/collections/speciality-roasted-coffee
And you can see the Turkish coffee roastings machines I deal with here https://topercoffeeroasters.co.uk