What is Coffee Roasting?

Coffee roasting is simply heating the coffee bean to prepare it for brewing. Coffee beans are roasted at temperatures between 370 to 450 degrees for up to twenty minutes. As the beans are roasted they lose about twenty percent of their weight and change from green to tan and eventually to dark brown.

The amount of time a bean is roasted determines the type of roast. As one would expect, less roasting time creates a light roast and more roasting time creates a dark roast. Roasting also changes the flavor of the coffee. Lighter roasts contain more subtle flavors of the coffee bean itself, and darker roasts get more of their flavor from the roasting process. Each variation is named, and quite often there are many regional names for the same type of roast. One interesting fact is that lighter roast coffees have more caffeine than darker roast coffees since the roasting process tends to break down the caffeine.

Yikes! Broken Coffee Carafe!

Almost everyone's had the experience, usually early in the morning, and often on a Monday, of making a nice pot of coffee and then hitting the glass carafe just right and "Crash!" instead of getting a hot cup of coffee, you end up with a cold floor of coffee and glass. This obviously doesn't start the day off well, but even after the mess is cleaned up and a quick stop at Starbucks (or other coffee shop) takes care of the caffeine fix, there is still the problem of getting a new coffee maker.

Wait - it's not necessary to get an entire new coffee maker! Most coffee maker companies sell replacement carafes, usually at much lower prices than for a full coffee maker. The trick is to find the right replacement carafe for your particular coffee maker brand. A good place to start for this is Replacement Carafe Net, a source of information about coffee carafes as well as a variety of other coffee topics.

Keeping Brewed Coffee Fresh

One thing you may have noticed when brewing coffee is that it tastes best right after it has been brewed. This is most apparent with coffee makers that use a heating element to keep the coffee warm instead of a thermal carafe. As brewed coffee continues to heat, the composition changes over time and gives it a bitter burnt flavor. As a rule, you don’t want to leave a carafe of coffee on the heat source for more than 30 minutes after it’s been brewed. Using an insulated thermal carafe eliminates some of this problem as the coffee retains its own heat from the initial brewing, but even with a thermal carafe, the coffee will taste best right after it is made.