WOLFF WEEKLY VLOGG 003 | Peter Wolff talks caramelisation in coffee
What is Caramelisation? Caramelisation deals with the primary sugar in coffee, which is sucrose. It’s really dealt with at the end of the roast. Most people would know caramelisation as the colour of the roast or the end temperature of the coffee - that would be regarded as the degree of caramelization. One of the things that we’re trying to do as roaster is find that balance of what we’re looking for.
The caramelisation really starts in the coffee roasting up and around as we hit first crack. That’s when we’re really focussing on it, in that commencement of the roast development phase. As coffee roasters, this is the area that allows us lots of scope.
So we can really choose the level of sweetness and complexity of that experience for our consumers. At the very start of the caramelisation phase the sugar is really super sweet. Very confectionary sweet is the best way I could describe it, or very much that of white table sugar - really simple sugar flavour. As we develop it further over time - and temperature as well - we get the sugar transitioning into a really lovely, jammy fruit intensity. It becomes quite thick and syrupy. It then moves from being jammy fruit sweetness into toffees, maple syrups. These specific flavour are origin specific. From that, we develop more complexity. With more complexity we get heavier flavours. That moves into the caramel, burnt caramel and the cocoa, chocolate notes that we know with a lot of coffees that are highly desirable.
We do reach a point of diminished returns, where we lose all of our sweetness and the coffee starts to become less sweet. Then it starts turning into bitter. This is where we start seeing more roast quality or pyrolytic tones coming into the cup. We’re now moving into what we call roast flavour as opposed to working with the origin. It’s sweetness at this particular point is extremely low and in some instances is completely diminished.
I guess our philosophy here at Wolff Roasters is that we focus purely on the origin and what the origin properties are. We’re constantly looking and playing around with the maillard phase and also the degree of caramelisation. We’re not just looking at one area in isolation. We are looking at all the aspects of the roast curve. In terms of caramelisation we’re certainly keeping it to a mid range flavour. We like hanging around in the toffees and the caramels and the jammy fruits sweetness. They’re really welcoming and interesting levels of sweetness to play with in the coffee.
