Behind every crack, every curve, and every shade lies the story of coffee’s journey — where craftsmanship meets flavor, and farmers’ work comes to life in the cup
Coffee roasting is one of the biggest — and most obscure — phases in the coffee supply chain. Roasting arguably has the biggest impact on flavor — even more than brewing, processing, or where the coffee is grown. So, why is it so hard to learn how to roast coffee?
For starters, one single coffee roaster is able to roast hundreds of pounds of coffee a day, so coffee roasteries usually only have the need for a few roasters at most. This is unlike the process of brewing coffee, where coffee shops will need on average 2 to 3 baristas at any given point throughout the day in order to brew and serve said coffee.
This is one of the main differences that drives the clear education gap between roasting and brewing. Not everyone who brews coffee knows how to roast. However, those who know how to roast more than likely know how to brew coffee, too.
More than that, while it’s not impossible, it can be very difficult to learn a new skill without continuous practice and firsthand experience. Not everyone has access to equipment, machinery, and the education necessary to operate such tools. However, transparency and roasting values are essential pillars of third-wave coffee.
With coffee prices on the rise, consumers should be as educated as possible and have the knowledge to maximize their buying power in the coffee industry. Knowing the quality, care, and experience of the coffee from seed, to roasting, to cup right off the bat is essential to ethically purchasing coffee. As it becomes increasingly important to support local coffee shops and roasters who utilize ethical sourcing practices and apply roasting theories, we here at DOCR would like to shed some light on our own roasting practices and why they are a core value of our business.
Anthony, our HQ + Production Manager, inspects freshly roasted coffee as it's cooling in the tray.
Light/Medium/Dark — What’s The Difference?
There’s a lot of verbiage used to describe the different styles of roasted coffee. The most common being light, medium, and dark roasts, though you might have heard words such as breakfast roast, french roast, and full city as well. The main difference between all of these styles of roasted coffee will be the final temperature the coffee reaches. The hotter the final internal temperature the coffee reaches, the darker the roast profile will end up being. Imagine we are baking cookies — the longer you leave them in the oven, the more brown and darker they become.
In recent years, trends in the specialty coffee industry have leaned toward lighter roasts — but why?
More often than not, if you were to order a prime rib at a Michelin-star restaurant, they would most likely serve it to you cooked rare — arguably, so you are able to taste the flavors of that expensive steak. If you were to take that same cut of prime rib, and pick up a cheaper prime rib from your local grocery store and cook them both well past done, you probably wouldn't be able to tell which is which just off of taste! The more you cook, burn, and char a steak, the less you are able to taste the actual flavors and the more you taste the burned and ashy flavor. Coffee is the same way!
For years, larger coffee companies (like grocery stores and instant coffee brands) have used this to their advantage. They were able to source large quantities of lower-quality coffee and roast it very dark. That way, consumers were unable to actually taste how poor the quality of coffee was, and instead just taste the roasted profile itself.
This practice worked out well for those large-scale coffee brands and grocery stores. For a long time, consumers of coffee thought that coffee was “supposed” to taste that way. This effort, in combination with large coffee corporations specializing in sweetened drinks, has made coffee drinkers lose touch with ethical sourcing practices and the coffee’s journey from seed to cup. These trendy sweetened coffee beverages and roasting practices have done an effective job of masking commodity-grade coffee and have been the ‘norm’ for coffee standards for years.
Here’s where third-wave coffee comes along. We are trying to revert the narrative, one where each coffee has a story to tell and actually tastes like the fruit the seeds came from. In order to do this, all specialty coffee shops, including DOCR, exclusively use roasting theory that aligns with this idea — that lighter roasts of coffee allow you to taste the flavor of the coffee better.
The taste and flavor are the most exciting thing about coffee for many specialty coffee enthusiasts. Which is precisely why specialty coffee shops and roasters place a very high emphasis on sourcing only the best quality coffee, with the best harvesting and farming techniques, and treating it with such care and consideration in roasting. Combine this purchasing and sourcing practice with roasting lighter coffee — then you allow the hard work of the farmers and the quality of the coffee to really shine through into the final cup. These practices in combination with one another add a new layer to what coffee can be, and specialty coffee lovers enjoy and prize cups that are fruity, juicy, sweet, and acidic. This cup profile can contrast quite drastically to what the average consumer ‘expects’ from a cup of coffee.
Specialty coffee shops also encourage recognizing the farmer for their hard work, usually by adding the farmer’s name and/or their farm name onto the coffee label itself. This aids in increasing transparency with sourcing and farming practices. Additionally, you might see the roastery add more details such as the variety of coffee, or the precise region it came from, elevation, or the process used to prepare the coffee cherries for export.
Specialty coffee has come a long way since it was commercialized, and the evolution and development of the coffee industry is still continuing today. As knowledge of specialty coffee increases, so do new studies and theories on brewing techniques and harvesting practices, bringing new experiences to the average coffee lover every day.
Anthony, our HQ + Production Manager, uses a trier to inspect the beans during the development phase directly from the roaster's drum to inspect the color and smell.
What Is Happening Inside The Roaster?
During the roasting process, there are several key developmental stages the coffee must undergo in order to become that sweet, juicy morning brew you know and love. Each stage is imperative to the roast quality and consistency in the final cup’s profile.
The first is called the drying phase. When a roaster drops room-temperature coffee into the hot roasting drum, the environment and heat quickly call for all of the moisture within the coffee to evaporate, effectively drying out the coffee.
Next we have the Maillard phase, which includes the same reaction you get when you sear a steak or toast bread. Essentially, the roaster is caramelizing the sugars in the coffee and starting to develop more complexity in flavor.
After, we have what’s called the first crack. This phase begins when the coffee has taken on so much heat the reaction switches from endothermic to exothermic. The coffee will quite literally crack open and you can hear it happening while roasting — it sounds like popcorn! After the roaster hears the first crack, then we switch into the development stage.
Development is the final stage where the coffee can be dropped at any point after first crack. Typically, development has some of the biggest impact on the coffee’s final flavor. Roasters are trained to follow the roast curve and use cues such as smell and color of the roast to tell when the development is finished. Once this is determined, roasters are able to drop the batch into the cooling tray, effectively completing the roast.
If a roaster were to continue to develop the coffee, we would eventually reach a phase called the second crack. This occurs when the oil in the coffee rises to the surface of each seed, and we hear another but slightly quieter cracking sound. Second crack is the marker for a ‘dark roast’ and is not a common roasting practice for DOCR or most third-wave coffee shops and roasters.
If you are interested in seeing the roasting process in person, we host Roastery Tours at our Ferndale HQ! Keep an eye on our Eventbrite for one soon.
Nate, DOCR's President + Director of Coffee, along with Anthony, our HQ + Production Manager, host a Roastery Tour inside our roastery at DOCR's HQ in Ferndale.
How Do Our Roasters Ensure Quality In Every Batch?
Our roasters here at DOCR have been extensively trained to follow batch protocol and maintain consistency in every roast. Being a previous roaster, I can definitely speak to the fact that it is a meditative process. Roasters primarily use the graphs profiled and follow them closely.
What are some other ways that we can ensure consistency in every single bag on our shelves? For starters — color. Roasters typically use the color of the coffee as a means to measure the amount of development it has reached. Comparing batches of the same coffee post-roast is an easy way to tell if we’ve unfortunately made a mistake. If the coffee looks different than previous roasted batches of the same coffee, then that is a big telltale sign that something went wrong during the roasting process. Oops.
Roasters also use something that we refer to as ‘roast loss,’ meaning the difference in the final weight of the same batch of coffee pre- versus post-roast. When green coffee arrives in our warehouse, it possesses some moisture, as it’s the raw product of a plant. When we apply heat (and intense amounts of it) to the coffee, we can imagine that this moisture evaporates from the coffee; thus, we see a weight reduction in the coffee after it’s roasted. We can use the amount of weight loss to our advantage by making sure each batch of roasted coffee weighs the same amount after each roast. It’s a great way to ensure the roast went according to spec. This method is typically used to measure consistency in coffee that needs to be shipped out the day of roasting that we are unable to taste-test beforehand.
The last method is something that we refer to as cupping! Cupping is a method that coffee professionals use to analyze coffees objectively. At DOCR, we take a sample from every batch of the same coffee roasted that week and set it aside for our Quality Control Cupping (QC Cup). We grind every coffee the same and brew them all at the same time in their own vessels. We are then able to taste all the coffees side-by-side. This allows our team of roasters to ensure each coffee of the same origin roasted that week all tastes exactly the same. If you ever buy a bag of coffee from us, you can bet our roasters have ensured it tastes up to par!
If learning more about this method interests you, feel free to take our next Palate & Sensory Basics class on Sept. 23 from 9–11am! If that date doesn’t work, we’ll be releasing classes from October through January next week. Just follow us on Instagram and Eventbrite for updates!
Photos of a QC Cupping at DOCR's HQ inside our Training Lab.
Coffee Sourcing
Our coffees at DOCR (link to coffees on website) come from all over the world — we are honored to continue to develop, year after year, our relationships with farmers and producers who are just as passionate about coffee as we are! So, how does this coffee end up in our hands?
A lot of coffees come to us through different coffee importers we work with — essentially folks who partner with farmers from multiple countries to sell their coffee here in the US. The more that we have grown as a company, the more relationships and coffees we have been able to source over the years. The more we source, the more we learn about incredible developments in coffee harvesting from different farmers across the world, and the greater the chance we’ll want to bring those coffees onto our pour over menu to try them out and share them with our corner of the coffee community in Michigan! Nate, DOCR’s President and Director of Coffee, primarily sources all the coffee for our shops — and he does so with complete care and respect for the coffee and craft.
A question you might have is: why don’t we have the same coffee on our menu all year long? If we’ve taken such care and dedication to have years-long relationships with farmers and producers, why not keep their coffee year-round? It mostly boils down to one ideal — coffee is a seasonal fruit, like most others! Most countries, aside from Colombia, only have one main harvest per year. So when we run out of a certain coffee, that’s basically all for the year, folks. We then have to interchange the coffees we offer on our menu regularly.
Most of the coffees we buy come from small, family-owned farms, too, so we are only able to buy so much coffee from them at any given time. Long story short, if you find a bag of coffee you really enjoy, I would recommend buying it while it’s still available, because there's no guarantee it will be there for long — or if we’ll get more of it. Just a pro-tip from one coffee drinker to another. Trust me.
Personally, I believe a seasonally rotating menu is the fun and exciting part about being a coffee roaster. Continuously switching coffees on our menu keeps us all on our toes — always anticipating the next release, the next favorite go-to pour over, the next coffee you’re excited to try. Keep following along on our blog for the next coffee release!
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About the writer: Emma LaVoie is the Education Manager for Dessert Oasis Coffee Roasters. She's the brains behind this blog and lit a fire under our team to follow suit. You can almost always find Emma reading a book with a coffee in hand. If you're interested in reaching out to Emma, shoot her an email: emma@dessertoasiscoffee.com. She'd be happy to geek out over coffee with you. (Seriously, don't hesitate to reach out — she'll love it.)