ROASTING DETERMINES COFFEE’S UNIQUE TASTE: GERMAN EXPERT

All coffees taste different - no one single coffee tastes exactly like another. The raw beans alone make a huge difference to how your drink tastes, but so does how they're roasted, reports Christina Bachmann for Deutsche Presse-Agentur (dpa.)

In the past, coffee beans used to be roasted slowly and gently in large cast-iron drums, says Bernd Braune, who owns Supremo, a coffee roasting plant in Germany. He's also a member of the executive committee of the German Coffee Association. "Today, we understand the roasting process better, and can do it a little faster," he says. Spending more time roasting coffee doesn't mean it's automatically better. "If you do it too slowly, the coffee tastes more like bread," says Braune. Industrial roasting takes 5 to 8 minutes, compared to 12 to 15 minutes with a traditional drum roaster.

The temperature is also important. "You start off slowly and raise the temperature fairly quickly to 200 to 220 degrees," he says. That's also something people can do at home, in a pan, he says. When he travels, he has a system, and brings his own equipment with him. "When we're on the road, we have a small gas stove and a sieve, then we roast the coffee over an open flame."

If you're roasting Arabica beans, you can tell how much it's been roasted by the color, Braune says. "There are lighter hazelnut-colored, medium milk chocolate and darker dark chocolate roasts." For consumers, a darker roast would be suitable for making espresso, while you might use a medium roast for filter coffee. "A fairly light roast would be something for a specialty coffee," he says. Some people like a dark roast, while others like it lighter. "Dark coffee tastes rather dark chocolaty," says Braune. "If I leave the coffee lighter, I still have all the fruity flavors, such as currant, orange and apple." Braune says that hipster cafes catering to the third-wave coffee generation will opt for unusual fruity flavors such as bergamot and blueberry.