What is Custom Coffee Roasting?
When a craft coffee roaster personalizes and adjusts his coffee roasting profile to fit a coffee bean blend to your your home coffee maker, we call it Custom Coffee Roasting. A roast profile simply refers to how the temperature develops during the time of the roast. After the coffee bean blend, the roast profile is the most important factor to determine the taste of your coffee.
Our Custom Roasted Coffee
Custom coffee roasting aims to develop the naturally sweetness in your coffee bean blend. At Peak Flavor Coffee, we practice custom coffee roasting by adjusting the roast profile to develop caramel, honey, and vanilla flavor notes whilst minimizing bitterness, acidity or burnt aftertaste.
Custom coffee roasting starts with your home coffee maker. At Peak Flavor Coffee, we adjust the time and the temperature in our roast profile to fit a blend of naturally sweet coffee beans to your home coffee maker. To get a match, we choose a coffee roasting profile to deliver a custom coffee roast with which your home coffee maker can extract naturally sweet, mild, and creamy coffee. As illustrated below, our small-scale, custom coffee roasting hits the coffee sweet spot for your home coffee machine.
Why is Custom Roasted Coffee Better?
Caramelization
When beans are roasted between 338 – 392 degrees Fahrenheit, you can think of them as crème Brûlée. Our custom coffee bean blends contain a fair amount of sugar and at this stage in the custom coffee roast, those sugars start to brown or caramelize. Caramelization contributes greatly to the flavor and balance of your coffee. In custom coffee roasting, our roast profile aims to extend the caramelization as long as possible by slowing down the roast. Roasting in smaller batches on a smaller roaster helps to create more caramel flavor too.
Maillard Reactions
Maillard reactions happen between 302-392 degrees Fahrenheit. Maillard reactions refer to the browning of green coffee beans during the roast. Maillard reactions are responsible for most of the flavor and brown color of the roasted coffee beans. Maillard reactions develop the natural sugars and amino acids in coffee beans. At Peak Flavor Coffee, we extend the time during which Maillard reactions can take place with the aim to preserve as much sweetness as possible. To maximize natural sweetness, we roast slow and in small batches. By adjusting our custom coffee roast profile, we can hit the coffee sweet spot.
Beyond the First Crack
At about 385 degrees Fahrenheit, coffee beans start to crack for the first time. At this point in the custom coffee roast profile, the beans are under a lot of pressure and crack open to release volatile gasses. At 446 degrees Fahrenheit, most of the coffee beans will crack for a second time as the walls of the beans crack open to make the coffee beans more porous and brittle. At this point of the coffee roast, the coffee beans are dark in color and a bit shiny from the release of coffee oils.
We Make Finding the Right Coffee Grinds Easy.
It is not easy to get a custom coffee roast to fit your home coffee maker at the grocery store. At Peak Flavor, we use custom coffee roast profiles to best match every coffee machine type. Our small-batch, custom coffee roasts enable your home coffee maker to extract naturally sweet, mild, and creamy coffee. Our custom coffee roasts hit the coffee sweet spot.
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Custom Coffee Roasting for Naturally Sweet Coffee
Like artisanal wine and cheese making, craft coffee roasters tend to favor roast profiles that highlight certain characteristic of the coffee bean blend. Because roasting “light” or “dark” is a little too simplistic for specialty coffee beans, we need to adjust the roast profile by manipulating time and temperature to match the coffee maker for which we are roasting.
A roast profile really determines the flavor of your home coffee. A custom coffee roast to achieve mellower, sweeter, and more comforting coffee would need to roast very slowly to higher temperatures over a longer time.
The longer and hotter a coffee bean is roasted, the more it’s flavor changes. At Peak Flavor Coffee, we practice custom coffee roasting to optimize 3 important reactions and events to enable your home coffee maker to extract a coffee that hits the coffee sweet spot: Maillard reactions, Caramelization and First crack coffee
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Custom Coffee for Espresso Machine
A custom coffee roast for Italian cappuccino or latte needs to be a little darker than for Italian espresso or macchiato. The aim of our custom coffee roast for cappuccino and latte is to slightly increase intensity, so that you can preserve enough coffee flavor, also after adding milk and milk foam.
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Custom Coffee for Drip Coffee Maker
Our roast profiles for naturally sweet, mild, and creamy drip coffee focus to start the Maillard reactions as early as possible and then extend caramelization for as long as possible. We stop the custom coffee roast between first and second crack to make sure your drip coffee maker can extract naturally sweet drip coffee.
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Custom Coffee for Pour Over
Custom coffee roasting for a pour over is like the roast profile for drip coffee. People, who prefer pour over coffee like the coffee intensity a chemex delivers. Our custom coffee roast for a chemex coffee maker is a little darker than for a drip coffee maker. Slowing down the roast after first crack allows us to make the coffee bean walls a little more porous, so that your pour over coffee maker can extract richer flavor for more intensity whilst preserving natural sweetness.
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Custom Coffee for Reusable K Cups
A custom coffee roast for reusable k cups needs to be fresh first. Optimizing the custom coffee roast profile, however, focuses on developing caramelization for as long as possible. A slow and small batch coffee roast for reusable k cups delivers the coffee sweet spot when more than 55% of the roast develops caramelization. At Peak Flavor, our custom coffee roast for reusable k cups stops well before second crack but still delivers a medium dark roast to hit the coffee sweet spot on your Keurig coffee maker.
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Custom Coffee for French Press
A French press requires a custom coffee roast with low acidity coffee and a high level of natural oils to yield abundant creaminess. Our custom coffee roast for French press aims to develop caramel, honey, and vanilla flavor notes. We stop our custom coffee roast for French press well before most beans have their second crack as we aim to have enough beans release natural coffee oils without developing bitter notes.
We Make Finding Your Coffee Roast Easy.
We know it is difficult to select the perfect coffee roast for your home coffee maker. Most coffee roasters for grocery store coffee don’t provide information about their roast. Larger coffee roasters employ roasting profiles that aim to roast as much coffee as possible as fast as possible to save cost. As a result, their coffee roast never really fits your home coffee maker, and you’ll have a hard time to extract better home coffee.
At Peak Flavor coffee, we customize our coffee roast to adjust for the extraction method of your home coffee maker. Our custom coffee roasts aim to deliver naturally sweet, mild, and creamy coffee on any type of home coffee maker. In short, at Peak Flavor coffee, we make it easy to hit the coffee sweet spot.
