Global climate change, frost in July in Brazil, pandemic etc...
With a post-apocalyptic feeling created by all these events, I thought of roasting robusta in September. Although I have roasted tons of arabica, I had never tried robusta. In fact, even making this decision felt strange, but since there is always experimentation in the pseudo-science of coffee roasting, It didn't matter what others said and wrote or what I read or watched.
There is no difference between a person who buy buys coins and with the collapse of the market loose all his money by taking advice of a friend who suggests "Buy bitcoin, it's going to skyrocket," and a roaster's denigration of robusta.
Robusta is bitter, cheesy, low-growing, cheap. We've always heard of these, but have we ever tasted it? Okay, we know it's in the blends we buy at the chain store, we're familiar with that flavor, but have we really given this bean a chance?
Don't expect a robusta praise from someone who roasts specialty coffee, this will be more of a restoring the honor. All I want is acceptance and a realistic approach.
Think of a blackcoat. It's lunch break, and he leaves the plaza and goes to the kebab shop, eats something hot, spicy and salty, and digs into an syrupy dessert . It is very difficult for the dried Ethiopian, raised by Faysel Abdosh, which I drink while writing this article, to be permanent in this man's taste range.
Of course, he may like this coffee, but it is not always drinkable, especially "specialty" coffees. It's like drinking a very high-end red wine at every dinner, every menu. In some dishes, some grapes are better, while in other dishes, wines made of whole another variety of grapes can be a better accompaniment.
There are fluctuations in every field in human nature. I think it's the same with food and beverage industry. Fixation to "dirty food" or "fine-dining" is not enjoyable. Sometimes it's fun to eat kebabs from the street stall around the corner, and sometimes a steak with café de Paris sauce in a good restaurant.
When you don't taste the two ends separately, you can't understand the pleasure of the difference. And it's also fun when the intervals in these fluctuations are variable.
My personal experience for robusta has only been with those market blends I mentioned. My expectation from these coffees was always super bitter, dry, smoky, plastic-like flavors. When the beans arrived we roasted and tasted them. A lot... In these cuppings, I realized that the bitterness of robusta coffee was not that high at all, and it was due to those supermarket coffees which are bad quality arabicas roasted clumsily. There is a bitterness in Robusta okay, but this is like a difference like dark chocolate/milk chocolate. The inclination from milky chocolate makes the dark one bitter, but if you put something sweet in your mouth for the first time that day, that dark chocolate is also a very sweet thing. In fact, robusta has a very rounded structure, so I expected a softer coffee by chipping the corners of the flavors in those blend packages, but as I've said, the main problem there seems to be arabicas used in those blends.
The point is that perceptions are contextual and what others say cannot be confirmed unless tried. I gave robusta a chance in this regard and we put robusta from two origins as single origin in our wholesale lists temporarily. Maybe we can offer it on retail store on the internet from the point of view of experimentalism.
There is a common answer we give to different questions we're getting asked on many subjects. I repeat this here as well.
Question: Why do you roast robusta as a roastery that roasts specialty coffee ?
Answer: Because we can.
