We roast in Flagstaff, Arizona. We love coffee; therefore we needed to become chemists? We used to roast with a heavy dose of romance: listening, smelling, timing, tasting, staring…but then we fell in love and wanted to learn all we could about the coffee when we turned up the heat. So we called upon science to teach us. Roasting using technology is a new art unto itself. With this new knowledge and the aid of a few scientific instruments we have become quite picky about our standards. It's a new kind of love.

There are several thermal/chemical reactions occurring to make coffee taste and smell so inviting. Polymerization, fractionization, decarboxylation, dehydration of quinic acid moiety, and many complex sugar reactions all occur in the roasting process.

The degradation and ultimate polymerization of sugars is of primary importance in roasting. Coffee is quite sensitive at temperatures which carmelize its sugars and which cause numerous changes to other organic compounds which affect flavor. What this all means to you is that darker roasts represent a higher degree of sugar carmelization and the presence of other flavorful organic material. The degree of carmelization is an excellent method for classifying degrees of roast.

The other component we pay close attention to is the matrix of the cell walls which is primarily made of cellulose. Severe damage can occur to the cell walls if coffee is roasted too quickly or at too high of a temperature. (Scientific talk for burning.)

Some aromatic chemicals, such as lignin, can be destroyed by roasting at too high of a temperature. Other delicate aromatic chemicals are not developed if the roast is too slow or too low in temperature. The key here is to roast, but not burn, and minimize what damage may occur to the organic flavoring material that enhances the complexity and quality in the cup. Because of such ethereal complexities in the roasting temperatures and timing, we have developed a "recipe" for each of our roasts.
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