There’s a lot of mystic around roasting, usually put about by people desperate to market their product in a loud marketing world. It’s actually pretty simple, but most people get confused about what’s important: they start with the talking about the beans and the generic tastes they’re supposed to have. Taste their coffee and you’ll often find they’re full of un-washed kopi luwak.

We reckon roasting is part of the process of producing a great taste.

We start by tasting a coffee and if we want something different, we work our way back: Maybe we’ve got a coffee that has a good balance of acidity, sweetness and bitterness, but we don’t like the hazelnuts. We look at the preparation method and maybe change the brew time or the water temperature, if that’s not doing it we look at the grinder and change the grind size or dose and if that’s not working we’ll go back to the roast. The flavour potential is inherent in the green beans we buy in. It is the roaster’s job not only to get the best flavours from the beans, but to manipulate the roast to get the balance of tastes and the aromas that we desire from that coffee. It’s even possible to create blends using a single origin.

For example, Megan was roasting a Kenyan Peaberry from Gethumbwini Estate and noted a lovely strawberry aroma coming out of her sampler. She decided that she wanted this in her espresso blend, but she also wanted it to be not too acidic and very sweet. In order to do this she roasted a batch of beans specifically for the strawberry notes and acidity and then roasted another batch of the same beans for sweetness and bitterness. She blended them in different ratios and after getting the blend closest to what she desired, she started again and roasted the beans afresh to a slightly different profile in order to further increase the sweetness. This is the blend she used to win best barista in Scotland 2011.

Here’s the reason that artisan has become such a cool term in coffee lately: the big guys can’t get the most delicate flavours from the beans. They make too many compromises in their processes for efficiency’s sake or to reduce cost or because they’ve tied themselves to some certification programme and can’t buy in the good beans.

Here’s the reason that artisan has become such a cool term in coffee lately: the big guys can’t get the most delicate flavours from the beans.