Coffee Cooling

Cooling your beans is just as important as heating them.

For those that don’t know, roasting green beans is a science. Kind of like baking. I mean, we are practically doing the same thing. Heating them up to the desired roast all the while controlling heat and air. Then there’s drum speed, air speed, charge temp and other variables.

One that is sometimes overlooked is the cooling. In most cases you want the beans cooled down to room temperature within 4 minutes of dropping them. Why? That helps stop them from continuing to roast. Since they build up a lot of thermal energy we need to stop that as quickly as possible. I try and be between 2-3 minutes for the cooling.

Some places use a light spray of water. That’s most common with larger roasters because of the amount of beans they need to cool down at once. I’m not a fan of that method plus it could add a little bit of water weight back into the bean.