ROUND HILL ROASTERY
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Roasting
In season
When roasting coffee we are aiming to highlight seasonality, the taste of the farm, the crop and the environment it was grown in.
It is largely down to this focus on terroir that we work in harmony with the growing seasons, a focus that is rewarded with getting to roast the freshest and most flavoursome coffee. Much like strawberries, asparagus or tomatoes; coffee is best enjoyed in season.
High stakes
By the time we get green beans in the roastery, most of the hard work has been done, there are no miracles we can perform to improve coffee we can only highlight and accentuate what is already there.
The reality is that you can very quickly undo all of the good work that’s gone into a coffee as a roaster as you’re dealing with high temperatures and quick times. A farmer’s harvest can be undone in ten minutes if the coffee is badly roasted, that’s a real pressure and that’s what keeps us developing, changing and learning.
It is for this reason that we invest heavily in our roasting equipment buying the best possible equipment and in terms of time and effort ensuring that our equipment is well maintained and regularly cleaned.
Quality control
A big part of our roasting process is our quality control. Every batch is data logged and monitored through data logging software. We can reference developments and changes as we have that coffee in the roastery from batch to batch.
Coffee is a crop and of course no two batches will ever be identical but we use all of the software and data to replicate the best tasting batches and we’re constantly cupping and improving on new coffees and those that are in production. It’s a very fluid and ever changing process.
Profile
Part of our work is in developing a profile, which is a kind of recipe for how we roast each coffee, this is something that’s always changing and evolving. We always aim to buy coffee that suits filter and espresso and we think those two types of coffee require slightly different profiles. We profile every coffee for filter and espresso, which is represented in our blue and pink bags respectively.
In filter coffee we’re looking for clean, crisp acidity, with good levels of sweetness, generally a fresher, cleaner taste and for espresso we’re looking for maximum sweetness with good body and texture whilst calming the acidity down.
