In the Beginning

A medical student’s first dose of caffeine isn’t to find out acidity, or knowing how much body, or what the tasting notes are. Caffeine existed to lengthen your attention span for as long as you can before getting derailed by the latest Facebook post or some eye-catching instagram story. As my caffeine fix got worse, so did my appetite for good quality coffee. I got a French press and picked up the best-looking coffee bag in Starbucks and started brewing. Knowing absolutely nothing about roasts, I bought a blonde roast and frankly didn’t even finish the cup. It was sour and did not pair well with cream and sugar. It was my first lesson in roast levels. Dark roasts have less acidity but more body. The cream and sugar dampens the body of these dark roasts and blends into this balance of body and sweetness. When I realized coffees from around the world had different flavors, I took out the cream altogether and tried to taste these coffees black. The acidity in medium and light roasts started to make sense. It opened up my world to the different ways coffee was grown and roasted. Eventually, I got a small hand roaster from Amazon and roasted away. It was a manual ceramic roaster where you had to shake it over a stove to agitate and roast the beans hoping you don’t scorch them. My shoulder began to hurt after the third batch. But the aroma and satisfaction of roasting your own coffee was well worth the pain. I wasted a lot of green beans, but what I learned from roasting manually gave me the knowledge I needed to roast bigger batches.