What is air roasted coffee?
I worked for a local coffee roaster in North Texas. It was one of the more exciting jobs I’ve had. I learned so much about the coffee roasting process, how to grind coffee beans, and how best to brew each type of bean.
I even got to help develop their cold brew program.
When I heard about air roasted coffee, it blew my mind. If you’re like me, you think of the big barrel of beans with their almost burnt smell when they’re roasting.
Air roasting turns the coffee roasting into a refined art that no one’s ever heard of.
This post explains this unique roasting process, what makes it different, and a little history behind the process.
What Is Air Roasted Coffee?
If you’ve ever been to your local coffee roaster, you’ve most likely seen their coffee roaster. It’s a large drum with a mechanical arm that turns the beans over during the roasting process.
You’re probably familiar with the unique smell of roasting coffee. This is the traditional roasting method known as a drum roaster.
A traditional roaster superheats the drum, and, as the raw beans hit the drum, they begin to roast. This is about a 15 minute process that has become the most popular way to roast green coffee beans.
Air roasting is a different approach to roasting coffee beans. It heats the air that the beans are suspended in to heat the beans evenly and blow off the chaff (the beans’ outer skin), all in a 4 minute process.
The most popular way to air roast beans is on a fluid bed of hot air. It’s more efficient and claims to retain more of the health benefits in coffee than barrel roasting.
Lovers of this roasting process say that it’s a cleaner tasting cup and is less bitter.
Why haven’t I heard of this?
Is this a new roasting method?
No.
Here’s a look at the history of this coffee production method that could’ve made it big but failed to launch into the popular coffee culture.
The History of Air Roasted Coffee
Coffee industry expert, Mike Sivetz, started his career in the instant coffee world in the 1960s. He was frustrated with the roasting process and scaling it up to meet the public’s want for instant coffee. He ran into a lot of pushback on updating the process to ramp up production. Frustrated, he left the coffee industry to pursue other career interests.
In 1974. Mike left his job to open a retail coffee roaster in Oregon. He began fiddling around with a fluid bed roasting system that he had worked with at chemical plants. Mike built his first fluid bed coffee roaster (air roaster) in his garage and hit gold.
He found that using hot, high pressure air to roast the beans produced a better, more evenly roasted coffee in less time than traditional methods. Elated at this invention, he turned his sights to retail coffee production dreams.
In a chance meeting, Mike presented his air roasting invention to a German company that was enthusiastic about his roaster. Neotech, the German company, was excited about this breakthrough but lagged in production.
Mike thought ahead and patented his invention. But with Neotech dragging their feet, his patent expired. This was the death of air roasted coffee making it mainstream. Mike’s patent expired, and air roasting fell to the obscure side of the coffee world.
Mike Sivetz is the grandfather of the roasting process that has so much potential. It failed to launch on a world market but is thought of as one of the superior methods to roasting coffee beans.
Here’s a look at the air roasting process.
The Air Roasting Process
Air roasting is a simple, more scientific roasting method than the traditional method of roasting coffee beans. Because of this roasting method’s obscurity, only 1% of coffee beans are processed using air roasting.
The still-green coffee beans are placed in a chamber where hot air is blown through the chamber. The bean levitates in the hot air, Which allows it to roast evenly. In a traditional barrel roaster, the beans are roasted when they hit the hot barrel in a less uniform roasting method.
As the hot air is evenly roasting, the air also blows the beans’ chaff, all while processing the roasting step. In barrel roasting, the chaff is sifted at the end of roasting or burns off during roasting. This can leave behind a burnt flavor on the beans.
Once the beans are roasted to the desired level, they’re placed in a cooling tank to rest until they’re ready for packaging. This whole roasting system takes only 4-8 minutes, as opposed to the barrel roasting method, which takes up to 15 minutes.
Is Air Roasted Coffee Better?
As with most thing coffee, it comes down to flavor. The flavor is a personal preference. The best way to look at whether or not air roasted coffee is better than traditional roasted coffee is to look at the differences between the 2 roasting methods.
Flavor
The biggest selling point of air roasted coffee is the flavor. The first thing you’ll pick up on with your first sip of this coffee is the flavor. I noticed an overall cleaner taste of the coffee.
This is due to the chaff being removed during the processing of the beans. When the chaff is left in the barrel during roasting, it usually burns, leaving behind a burnt undertone to the coffee.
Air roasted lovers also claim a noticeable lack of bitterness and acidity found in traditionally roasted beans.
Roasting Time
The biggest selling point for a roaster is the roasting time with air roasted coffee. The ability to evenly roast clean tasting coffee in less than 1/2 the time of barrel roasting gives the roaster the advantage of scaling up their production with consistency.
Not only is the roasting time cut in half, but the consistency of the roast is so dependable. If you want a light roast, as long as you follow the right temperature and length of roasting protocols, you’re always going to achieve a light roast.
What’s really amazing about the precise roasting (and timing) of an air roaster is the ability to achieve the fine nuances of different roasts within a broader roast. If you’re looking for a city roast and not a full city, the roaster has the ability to meet this slight variation.
Air roasting is done by achieving the bean’s temperature rather than a color. Barrel roasting is done by getting the barrel to a set temp instead of getting the actual bean to a set temp.
This, combined with the shorter roasting time, gives a coffee roaster the advantage of consistently achieving the same roast, color, profile, and production time to keep their customers happy and never run behind on their production schedule.
You can see the huge advantages of using an air roaster for a larger coffee roaster.
Chaff
I’ve mentioned the chaff differences in air roasting, but I want to touch on it again. When you air roast coffee, the chaff is blown off in the fluid bed instead of left to bounce around the drum and burn freely.
Because the chaff is not burned in the roasting process, the coffee has a smoother profile. It’s less bitter and acidic. These flavors are the biggest complaints of coffee drinkers. Those flavor profiles (acidic and bitter) can also cause the classic jitters associated with drinking coffee.
Air roasted coffee is also gentler on the stomach. It doesn’t cause the sour stomach that some coffee drinkers complain about.
Since the chaff isn’t burned from a health standpoint, it claims fewer carcinogens than traditional coffee.
Conclusion
Air roasting is the miracle that never became the game changer it was meant to be. It went the way of Google Glass. Remember the glasses that would put your smartphone literally in front of your eyes?
It’s a shame that air roasting isn’t more popular because it really is genius. I’ll be writing a review of air roasted coffees in the future.
Have you tried air roasted coffee?
Let me know what you think of this revolutionary coffee method in the comments.