#8 Everyday Science in Coffee Roasting with NYSF
National Youth Science Week: Science in the Workplace, Coffee Roasting.
It is often said that in the specialty coffee game education is at the forefront of the industry, for increasing sales of retail beans to selling high end beverages, the key to getting the customer to understand the value of the offerings is in them grasping they are of a high quality.
This involves explanation, which in turn involves providing staff with the knowledge to make any advice imparted upon the customer leave an impression.
But on the whole few venues offer a comprehensive training program, by this I mean a training space that provides a hot bed from ideas. Most baristas will tell you apart from the summary 2 hour barista basics course they were largely left to figure a lot of this additional knowledge out for themselves. Roasters too have little better chances to spark their learning, where does one go to have washed and natural explained, or more advanced concepts such as density, altitude and gas chain explained.
At Blue Sky alongside working on the espresso bar I push myself to give a little more: we regularly host public cuppings, filter brewing talks and coffee showcase nights. Engaging people in a way that is less intimidating often encourages more confident questions and gets a better conversation about the core issues.
This year I was offered the opportunity to host a group of students and a group of upper secondary teachers as part of National Youth Science week. It was put to me to talk about science in the workplace: roasting coffee roasting does of course comprise a massive amount of science behind the scenes, but it is poorly understood and left unconsidered by many roasters. Science in upper secondary too can sometimes to teens feel like it leads to a dead end, as if it is poorly explained has little to no practical application for young people trying to enter the workforce. I jumped at this chance to speak about what is really going on in the fabled cuppa.
My talk steered away from a how to on roasting coffee and focused on the core science behind it, we discussed conductive heat vs convective. Sucrose decomposition and acidity changes throughout the roast process. I discussed mainly the unchanging aspects of heat transfer and didn’t delve too far into roast profiles. Science is best used in roasting to consider the underlying themes that allow repeatability and consistency. The ever-changing nature of coffee provides us with a tricky vantage point to base all our roasting choices off, many students and teachers were amazed about how much work goes into keeping the same coffee similar for weeks and months on end amongst green ageing and weather changes. After I felt the students grasped the chemistry involved, they observed a typical roast on Blue Sky’s 5kg roaster.
Not only was the day a massive success but many students were left with a lot of food for thought on just how much work goes into producing coffee. Educating and explaining left me with a deeper understanding of what we as coffee professionals do on the day to day. Indeed I was left with a lot of science I took for granted but that was under the surface of my roasts all along.
Each time you facilitate discussion it provides a wonderful ability to check whether you leave an impression against a wide group of people, its refreshing, because you hold your own business up to the microscope and examine how to engage better.
At the start of this article I said our education falls flat a lot of the time, because for a beginner it is hard to know where to start. Working with young people one must consider the educating will one day flow the opposite way, creating the next group of employees.
What they take away, is almost always what also comes back to you in the long run. I hope some of these high school students come back as professionals with their own perspective and the intention to make coffee better, smarter and stronger as a result!
Text by Callum Jub
All photos provided with generous permission of NYSF.