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On Coffee

Posted on 2022-05-03 by Nick Thomas

April's Ethical Consumer magazine carried a fairly detailed piece on coffee; some of the detail is available to non-subscribers here:

=> https://www.ethicalconsumer.org/food-drink/shopping-guide/coffee-and-coffee-beans

I've previously¹ mentioned in passing that I get my coffee from the Escambray mountains of Cuba, via a distributor in the UK. How I turn the unroasted beans into a tasty drink contravenes the article's recommendations in a few ways, and the process might be of interest to some, so let's have a palate-cleansing essay on the topic.

=> [1]: Projects for 2022 | https://www.cubadirecto.com/cuba-coffee/exotico-green-cuban-coffee-beans

Motivation and process

Originally, this was a prepper-ish response to impending brexit - I wanted to be able to store a large quantity of coffee, and be able to prepare it even if the lights went out and we found ourselves living in a post-apocalyptic hellscape. Quite apart from needing caffeine to get through such a time, I'd be trading it for food! So I needed to be able to store the coffee for a long time, and be able to prepare it without electricity.

Pre-roasted beans simply wouldn't last long enough. Green, unroasted coffee beans come in simple paper sacks, and can be stored indefinitely like that in any reasonably dry environment.

I didn't think about instant coffee at all - I understand that some people drink it, but I never have. I suppose it's an option, if you can stand it, but the storage characteristics are inferior anyway.

Using green beans means we have to be able to roast them in a no-power environment. The Shetland house has a solid fuel stove, and here in Yorkshire I have a chiminea. Both provide a simple heat source, using widely available fuel. In Yorkshire, there's plenty of trees, of course. In Shetland, there aren't many trees, but there is a lot of peat - the idea of peat-roasted coffee really tickled my imagination.

I keep roasting as simple as I can, but it's a touchy process. 100g of green beans go into a Zenroast², which is a ceramic pot with a funky handle. Pop it straight onto the embers. You want the heat to be fairly low, and to keep the beans constantly moving to avoid burning them. As they roast, they release their skins as chaff; it's easy to blow it away. Doing this with a naked flame, you'll need some kind of hand protection - the leather wrap on the zenroast's handle isn't sufficient by itself.

=>

As they roast, the beans make cracking sounds, a bit like popcorn. These come in two distinct phases - "first crack", then "second crack" (which is the point at which the beans have gone exothermic - they're burning themselves up and releasing heat in the process). I mostly look at the coloration, aiming for a deep brown that's well short of black, but this is personal taste. The less roasted they are, the more caffeine they have, but if you don't roast them enough, they won't grind properly and will taste like grass.

There will always be some variation between individual beans roasted like this, but they should all be broadly the same colour; if not, agitate them more when roasting. The time taken varies wildly, depending on how brave you are with the heat - I've had batches take anything from 20 minutes to an hour. Once you're done, pour them out onto a baking tray and leave to cool. An example:

=> The finished product

Here, we see a fair bit of variation, and a lot of beans that have caught a bit of black, but the bulk of them are the colour I personally like. It's an acceptable batch, but not a great one.

Since second crack is exothermic, the beans will continue to darken for a time after you remove them from the heat; this shouldn't make much difference, except at the margins, but it's cool to know about.

Once they're cooled, pop them into a container (I use old illy cans). You can grind and brew them straight away, but sources I've read claim you should give them until the next day to settle down. I can't taste the difference, personally. Definitely best used within a week or so, though.

I use a Knock³ manual grinder for the next step. This uses "burr grinders" to break up the beans, which do a good job of ensuring the particles are an even size, and it's easy to fine-tune the size for different brewing methods. I tend to grind beans immediately before I'm going to use them - it makes for a nice part of my waking-up routine. I can't really taste the difference between that and day-old grinds, though.

=> [3]: Knock aergrind

Finally, to brew, I have an aeropress⁴ with the Fellow Prismo⁵ attachment. It produces decent results across a wide grinder range, and - unlike a regular aeropress using the "inverted brewing method" - comes with very little risk of scalding.

=> | [5]: Fellow Prismo

Taken together, the zenroast, knock grinder, and aeropress form a compact kit that could go camping with you, although for most such trips, I'd take pre-roasted whole beans and leave the zenroast behind. It might be worth it if you were doing a month away from civilisation, though.

Upgrades

For me, the above approach works fine, but it's labour-intensive enough that I don't want to be doing it all when there's electricity available. So after satisfying myself that I could manage without, I started adding some labour-saving upgrades.

Replacing the fire with an electric or gas hob makes the whole thing much simpler and less messy. I still roast on wood occasionally, to make sure I still can, but I normally just use the cooker these days. The Zenroast won't work on induction hobs; I don't have a good suggestion for those.

The Knock grinder's shaft is just the right size to attach to an electric drill. I'm sure it's not coincidental. For those days when you just don't want to do it by hand, you can get it done in under a minute with this little trick. I'm usually fine with hand-grinding, though.

The aeropress does get regular use, but I have several other brewing tools as well, including a cafetiere and an espresso machine. I bounce between them depending on taste; the ground coffee can go into any of them, as long as I adjust the particle size to suit.

Resiliency / downgrades

With or without upgrades, this pipeline relies on a lot of equipment, and in a post-apocalyptic hellscape, replacements will be hard to come by. I could probably remake a zenroast from scratch, given time, but the rest... not so much.

The grinder could be replaced by a pestle & mortar, or perhaps a millstone; this would produce finer particles, which in turn, necessitates simpler brewing methods, such as turkish coffee. Overall, I'm confident that I could keep my coffee going until the beans ran out.

Could I grow my own beans? In Shetland, almost certainly not. In Yorkshire... probably not, but maybe. Green coffee beans will sprout if soaked in water, so it's an option to explore if stockpiles started to run low.

Ethics

So what are Ethical Consumer's complaints? First, that my beans come from what they've chosen to label as an "oppressive regime". This is a worldview sort of thing, but you could always get your beans from one of the oppressive regimes you favour instead.

Second, they make the case that it's better for the workers to purchase beans that are roasted at source. This argument has a lot more merit to it, and is basically a version of the "resource curse" - exporting unrefined products can impoverish a country. Role-playing a prepper and spending my copious free time on roasting the beans myself, rather than paying a colectivo in Cuba to do it for me, is equivalent to taking money from them.

It's food for thought, but I'm not particularly stressed about this in my case - the argument is much stronger if you're buying coffee that is already roasted, just not at source.

They did a thorough analysis of coffee-brewing devices, and said mean things about my espresso machine, but the aeropress was given a big thumbs up. They didn't go into roasting or grinding in any detail, but I'm sure the idea of burning peat to roast coffee would horrify them. Fortunately, I don't do that any more - it never did much for the flavour anyway.

They had a companion piece on tea, and there was a lot more actionable insight for me in that one. Perhaps I'll cover it once I'm fermenting my own tea leaves(!)

Questions? Comments? Criticisms? Contact the author by email: gemini@ur.gs

=> mailto:gemini@ur.gs