Welcome back to part five of the Powered Labs’ brewing saga, the mystical journey for the ultimate cup of java. Last night we performed the inaugural roast, but today we wait anxiously before the grinding can occur. It is the purgatory for coffee lovers.
Time, thou art a cruel mistress. Temptation is sitting right next to me sealed in a brown bag. The aroma now ever present and lovely. 24 hours down and 24 more to go since the night of the roast, in the interim we have roasted a few more batches causing the office to take on a kind of coffee house smell. IT IS TORTURE… It’s as if the workbench of coffee disseminating devices were all calling out to me “Use me, brew in me” one of our staff thought they heard the grinder shutter and begin to weep. Ok, that might not be true, but that is how we felt.
All I can think of now is drinking this coffee. Is it good? Did we preform the roasting correctly, how long should we wait to brew?
Like most often in life, opinions vary, the industry as a whole varies on the topic of how long to wait. It’s kinda like resting a steak…wait that does work, but is a seemingly terrible example. Steak is not coffee although a good coffee rub on a steak is quite tasty…ok again I might be off topic…maybe, but I am kind of hungry. Anyhoo, its true coffee (& steak) take time to fully come to full flavor. One of my heavy volume local roasters stated “They wait at least 24 hours to taste test their roasts,” but I took this as an established baseline, which they used and not a full flavor test. Coffee needs time to breath or release its pent-up gasses. This time is necessary to mellow the coffee, which can be bitter or severely lack its full flavor if brewed to quickly.
And so we wait… tick tock. 24 more hours to go.
Well not for you all. See you next week for the smelling, grinding, smelling, brewing (French press), smelling, and tasting of Sumatra. By the way, in case you missed it, there might be a lot of smelling involved next week before the tasting… all we’re saying is that smell is very crucial to taste. The olfactory kicks in as a foreplay to the tastebuds coming online. Ever have a friend of family member say “Here, taste this, see if it’s good or bad?” (Note: the word “See”: meaning the sense of sight and not smell, is a strange statement.) The first thing you do is smell the… essence, or whatever it may be, before ingesting it.
SSSOOOOooooo tune in next week for a smelling good time and “see” how the coffee tastes… “see” what I mean about the “see thing, kinda weird. so to speak.
Go Coffee!!! Bonne Boisson mes amis! A ta santé!