Back In The Saddle

Cowboys used to drink coffee. I wanted to find out what coffee might have tasted like in the wild west, or after a nuclear apocalypse (or global environmental disaster) which sadly, is a more likely reality for my generation.

Taking that large sample of green beans that I had, I put about a pound in a cast iron frying pan and proceeded to roast them over an open flame . . . Aiming for a complete roast time of about thirteen minutes.

The main difference I knew of, that would alter the flavor from what I'm used to on a modern drum roaster, was the amount of conductive heat in the roast. As a drum roaster rotates... Like a tumble dryer, three kinds of heat work together to raise the green coffee's temperature; Conductive, Convective, and Radiant.

The open flame fryingpan method of roasting, I reckoned, would maximize conductive heat (that is heat transferred from the hot iron directly to the bean), and minimize convective (heat transferred from the hot-air surrounding the beans) and Radiant heat (heat transferred from bean-to-bean). Each type of heat contributes to the overall flavor of the resulting roast.

Other side effects of this method included the amount of chaff; that is, what's left of the silver skin which lines each coffee seed from the surrounding parchment and cherry husks. On a drum roaster, the operator is able to use air-flow to blow off the chaff, resulting in a cleaner roast . . . There were also a lot of Quakers; beans that do not fully develop due to their unripeness or low density. This was to be expected though as the green sample was a melange of various origins.


I handicapped the experiment by using my nearly empty freezer to create a ghetto cooling phase after the roast, the cooling phase being critical to a tasty roast.



After the coffee had cooled sufficiently, I skipped the de-gassing phase and brewed up a pot of the resulting roast, as I imagine a cowboy coffee roaster might have done.

It tasted revolting.

Yet another reason to seek professional help when purchasing coffee for your home, and an even better reason to avoid a nuclear war.